Big City

M has pointed out to me that I have a tendency to write a lot. Not just a lot, exactly, but that I seem to enjoy talking about every little thing I've been doing. This is somewhat true.

Part of the problem with carrying around a camera and recording the things I do, is that it quickly turns into an obsessive need to record EVERYTHING and to make sure that nothing is left out. It's almost as if by leaving something out, I'm not being honest about what happened. As much as I enjoy when others read about this stuff, I think I write it mostly so that I have a record of events. It's funny that I do this mostly in places where I'm traveling, since I don't feel as much of a need to do it while I'm home. Who knows though, maybe that will change if I start doing this a lot. Also, there's much more of a time constraint at home. And as I've pointed out, the more interesting things tend to be the ones that I don't think to get a picture of, which makes it even MORE exciting for you to look at.

Moving on, Berlin is a big city. We get a map from the hotel and realize we're not even going to come close to seeing most of the city. We're staying just north of the former East/West border (on the east side). The desk clerk points us a bit more northeast across the river to an area she says has lots of nice things to see and will be fun to walk around. We head over that way. A man sees us looking at the map and stops us. After our usual claims of Kein Deutsche, he keeps asking us something and drawing a big question mark with his finger? We are extremely puzzled and respond various times by saying that we came from the hotel, that we got the map there (maybe he wants a map?), to which he is continually more frustrated. Eventually we figure he's asking us where we are trying to go (which would make sense considering he's been saying "Wo?" a lot) and tell him "Alexanderplatz", which is when he points us in the direction we were already going.

We thank him, and continue going where we were going.

On our way, we see that there is much new construction, but also, some heavy-duty concrete communist stuff.

I think that it is interesting that hotel clerk didn't point us to anything interesting in former West Berlin.