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We got to admire the East Side Gallery on our walk to the train this morning. It’s a selection of murals painted on the longest parts of the Berlin wall. One part of the wall was removed by O2 to put up a giant billboard.

Gallery

@[500941493:Jennifer Ann Smith] recommended that we go on the Alternative Berlin Tour because she really enjoyed it. The tour was free and promised to uncover the secret side of Berlin. Our guide was really nice and from Aberdeen, so we had a good chat about Scotland.

Our first stop was an alley in Mitte which is covered in graffiti and, because it’s listed, no one can paint over it.

Gallery

There was a scary metal monster you could put a Euro in and it would flap it’s wings. Got to go back and try this sometime. I thought @[512391479:Miquette Breitenbach] would love this wall.

Our next stop was Kunsthaus Tacheles, a bombed out department store (similar to Selfridges) that became a famous squat and is now an artist residence. The building looks crazy on the outside. It’s still huge but it use to be five times the size.

Gallery

It was so colourful inside from all the graffiti. There are little shops where you can buy postcards and prints.

Around the back of the building is an iron works and beach bar. If you look closely at the building you can see bullet holes in the walls and there are statues with missing heads because Russian soldiers shot them off during the war.

We then went down to Hallesches Tor, Kreuzberg to see the 50 Faces Gallery – a housing estate painted with 50 faces – some of the people who live there and some of celebrities.

Nearby was the Tommy-Weisbecker-Haus, another squat house which had been painted on all four sides. It was painted by one man and took him 6 months to finish.

We then headed to the Turkish area of Berlin and to a market where we could get some street food. This was fried and filled with cheese and spinach. It was delicious but I’m not sure what it’s called?!

Our final stop on the tour was an old train depot which had been bombed during the war. Today it's used as a club.

The inside of the building had been turned in to a skatepark.

There was also a nice cafe so we stopped for hot chocolate. I don’t know what’s different about German hot chocolate but it’s so much tastier.

We then went to the Deutsches Technikmuseum. The museum use to be part of the Berlin-Anhalt Railway company but was abandoned for 30 years before re-opening as a museum.

Gallery

It was a huge place and filled with hundreds of trains. This is what it would look like if you went underneath one. It was too big to see everything but it’d be cool to go back someday and explore it more.

I was sleepy afterwards so we perked ourselves up with some apfelstrudel.

We headed back to our hotel afterwards to pack and shower before going for dinner in the hotel pizzeria. I had gnocchi and vegetables.

We didn’t feel like going to bed afterwards, like we really needed to, so I did some googling and found out that @[156756966477:Tim Kasher] was playing a few blocks away from our hotel. The gig had started by the time we arrived so we eavesdropped from the cafe upstairs.

I wanted to try some traditional German food so Tom did some googling and found a vegetarian take-out place called Yellow Sunshine that’s open until 1am and I got to try some vegan currywurst which was really nice!