Communist History and an 11 Euro Haircut in Berlin

Yikes!! I know I got back from Berlin almost three weeks ago, but the blog's finally here.

We spent our first day in Berlin doing a fantastic free walking tour, which took us to pretty well all of the highlights of the city. Luckily we all agreed we were most interested Cold War era East and West Berlin, so we returned on our own to the Berlin Wall's East Side Gallery, the DDR Museum, and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum was huge! We thought it was only a few rooms, but it just kept going and going. So many stories of escape attempts, people got really creative.

One of my favourite parts of Berlin was Kastanienallee in Prenzlauer Berg, an area which reminded me a bit of Commercial Drive in Vancouver. We spent some time shopping there and found a cafe serving pay-what-you-can vegan food! We had delicious soup and cake, and payed full price because even that wasn't much.

Nearing the end of our stay in Berlin, we of course heard about the Icelandic volcano. Luckily Angie and I had already booked our train tickets to Koln and then Brussels, but Gab and Sanne were in a bit of a scramble to find an alternate way to their destinations. After Sanne and Gab were on their way by train, Angie and I had a leisurely day in Berlin, visiting the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (it was destroyed by bombs but left standing as a reminder), seeing what we could of the Berlin Zoo from outside the fence (actually quite a lot), playing on a very adult friendly playground (it had a cool see-saw, and zip-line type thing!), and getting 11 euro haircuts at a place just down the road from our hostel (and they were great haircuts too!). It was then time to grab our bags and catch our midnight train to Koln.
Our two days visiting Koln and Bonn were great too. We discovered that the Koln U-bahn has a line all the way to Bonn (1 hour), so getting there was really easy. We had fantastic weather, and it was lovely to walk along the Rhine, or sit on a plaza and eat ice cream. We saw Beethoven's house in Bonn, and the Kolner Dom (the giant, blackened cathedral in the centre of town that has never been cleaned).