After a recent weekend in Berlin of being raced through the city in the back seat of a car as various sites were pointed out to me, I made a few observations about the city.

• Streets are long wide and straight.
• Pedestrians stop and wait on red lights to cross streets, unlike Dublin where they walk as soon as the cars are clear or Seattle where they walk regardless of light or traffic.
• Germans who weren’t even born during the war are still apologetic about it, making statements like, “war memorials are all over the city for every group of people we slaughtered” as if they were even alive then.
• Some of the buildings that survived the war still have bullet holes.
• It is interesting listening to Germans talk about the wall coming down and the emotional impact. “All I knew about the east was that they couldn’t buy bananas and it was grey and smelled.”
• Where the wall was there are now buildings lining the streets as if the wall was never there. There are some places without building and now cobblestone paths run along in place of the wall, besides a couple of memorial sites.
• Driving around you find that just about everywhere you go there are road diversions, roadblocks, and traffic jams. One caused by the green party which is a bit ironic.
• Germans don’t have any concept of customer service and will often tell the customers in a rude blunt manner that the customer is wrong. We saw this happen twice and experienced it once.
• Berlin is the possible ground zero of the hipster plague. It could be debated if it started in London of Berlin, after visiting both I’m leaning towards Berlin.
• Museum Island is a great way to spend the day.

Maybe on the next visit we can get out of the car.