I really liked Berlin. I wish we had even just one more day there to check it all out properly. We only had two nights there, and arrived in pretty late on the first. Our hostel was really cool. The room had a built up platform and the mattress sat inside there.

We didn't do much on our first night. By the time we got in on our bus and dumped our bags in the hostel, the sun had already gone down, so we went out for dinner and called it a night.

In the morning, we skyped our parents before rushing out the door to get to our concentration camp tour on time. We made it. Hooray. We met our guide and then the tour group got together and we headed to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. We caught a train about 40 minutes out of Berlin and then walked another 20 before we reached it. It was a very different experience.
We walked through a big iron gate that had the words 'arbeit macht frei' integrated into the design. 'Work will set you free' in German. Upon walking through the gates, you enter a large area where the 'inmates' used to be gathered for their roll call and were forced to partake in a number of labour intensive tasks. There wasn't enough time to see the entire camp, due to the size, but we managed to visit the parts the left the biggest impact. I remember looking down at the ground at one point and thinking about the number of less fortunate people who had stood in the same spot, not by choice, but purely based on their race, gender or sexuality.
We visited what was known as "Station Z" - the crematorium. The idea behind the name came from the prisoners entering the camp through tower a, with the intention of the exiting through station z. It was some disturbing s***. There are several ovens still in the room, and the foundations of where the gas chamber was still remains. We also visited one of the bunkers where the prisoners used to be kept. The section where true beds were laid out has been cornered off by glass so you can't access it, but we sat in the area that was used for meals while our guide spoke to us and ran us through the typical day of the people at Sachsenhausen. The room had a real musty smell and it was real eerie feel to it. I think that was where it sank in for everybody. So many horrible things had happened here, and it really wasn't that long ago. The guide even informed us that there are still political groups that believe that what happened there is right, and run in each of the elections. The experience as a whole was exactly what you would call pleasant, but it was humbling and very eye opening and we were both happy that we did it.
After we returned back into the city of Berlin, we caught a train to the Berlin Wall. It's such a mad wall. The art on some sections is insane! We spent a couple of hours walking up and down taking photos and checking it all out, and didn't even reach the end. It is so colourful and the people who have made these pieces of art are so talented. It's pretty unfortunate that the public can just walk up to it and write over it, because it has caused for some s*** things to be written on the wall over the art such as "belieber" and "one direction", but karma will get those people. We didn't get a chance to check out the entire wall because we had to rush to catch a boat because we booked a city of lights tour. That was pretty cool. We sat on the top section of the boat and froze. The tour boat guy kept yelling at people over the microphone to sit down. "You cannot stand on the upper level, please sit down", or his other favourite, "the bridge is very low, please sit down." He added the please in to sound nice but he sounded mean. I enjoyed it a lot and kept saying it in my super accurate German accent, much to Brendan's disapproval. The cruise wall pretty cool, we got to see most of Berlin from the river which was cool because we didn't have much time to check out the city.

We had to catch the train early in the morning to the airport so we didn't even get to spend some of the day in Berlin. It was actually the first airport we had been to in so long that had things to do. There was an Irish bar there, so while we waited for our plane, we decided to drink to get into character for Ireland.