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Jono's Travels
We woke this morning to another hot day, before 8am it was already 28 degrees and its suppose to get even hotter. We are on a walking tour this morning around some of the sites of Berlin with a history major named Jonathan, easy name for me to remember and it's even spelt the same way as mine. We looked around a number of the sites in Berlin, lots of different monuments, we headed to the "Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism" and took a look around it, then we headed off to the site where Hitlers bunker was, it's nothing now except a car park. His escape hatch for his bunker has now also been turned into a sandpit. We headed off from there to a large memorial for the Jewish called "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe". It was a nice memorial to see, a lot different to many of the others I've seen. It was essentially thousands of concrete blocks, all laid out nicely in rows and columns, the height of the blocks varied as did the height of the ground the blocks were on. We went through and took some photos and found that we can actually head down below it and look though a kind of museum, will have to do that later on today I think. From there we moved on to look at some other buildings and saw some more of the wall and then headed to Checkpoint Charlie, one of the main checkpoints during the time the wall was up that people used to get between the sides of the wall. We then left our guide for the walk of Berlin and made our separate ways on to do our own thing. Tall Ryan, Damien, Lieu, Eloise, Tim & myself made our way to the Mall for something to eat, it was an extremely large mall, but we only wanted the food court. We ended up having to go to the top floor and over to the other side just to get to the food court. I ended up getting Chinese for lunch which was just enough to keep me satisfied. We then headed to the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" to go underneath and see a museum of some more info of the murdered Jewish. It was very well laid out and had a lot of things to look at, one of the most terrible things to see was a photo of someone driving a bulldozer to push the bodies of the dead around. We also read snippets of some of the letters people had written to their family members as they were being carted off to the camps, they were sad to read, only one of the letters was from someone who actually survived the camps. After the memorial I decided to head back to the hostel as it was getting late and I still needed to catch up with Lana to get my washing before heading out for the day. I caught the train back and got to the hotel so I could get some wifi and made sure Lana was home before making my over to her place. I checked the time as I left the hostel and realised I had to be back in an hour or so, so ended up running to Lana and Mel's place in 34 degrees, not the funniest, nor was it easy seeing I have already walked a bit today and haven't really had many runs since I've been travelling, but thankfully it was only a short run. I arrived, had a quick catch up before grabbing my washing, saying farewell and heading back to the hotel, once again running in the heat. I headed to my room to get showered before going out, only to realise I had left my card in my room and no one else was in there to let me in. I headed out to the counter to see if I could get a temporary card, only to find Damien had just arrived back. Thank goodness, however his card unfortunately didn't work either and he had to get it recoded again anyway. I got showered and changed for tonight's artistic walking tour / followed by a pub crawl, it was still really hot, and wasn't going to drop below 26 degrees for the evening, however I decided to still go out in jeans, shorts just didn't seem right for a pub crawl which finished at a club. We hit the streets for the artistic tour and saw some of the illegal artwork painted up on walls of the streets, and then we hit the streets for a pub crawl. We made our way around some of he pubs and finally hit a club called Matrix, about 50 meters away from our hotel, so it was real quick to get home... Well for most of us, turns out that one of the girls caught a taxi, costing her about 10 Euros to get home. I hear that the driver just drove around for a little bit, I'm guessing he realised she had no idea where she was so he just drove around to pretend that he was taking her some distance.
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