Berlin

When you travel by train, you get to see some amazing landscapes. Even better, when you get in to a city you get to see some wicked graffiti.
There is a lot of graffiti in Berlin. A lot of buildings with broken windows, empty lots, general decay and the accompanying flowering of underground life. Unfortunately I didn't really get to see alot of it when I was there.
For a start, I was there for three days, one of which I spent in my hostel bed with a dripping nose and sinuses that felt like barbed wire implanted under my skin. Discovering the best places for street art and the coolest venues and cafes that only the locals go to takes some dedicated wandering. Of course, I could have taken the 'Alternative City' tour. For 12 Euros, I would be shown, according to the brochure, 'streets, squats and subculture'. Tempting. This is what attracted me to Berlin in the first place. But it seemed like such a lazy option, and (this may sound silly, I don't care) ethically dicey. I wondered what I would feel like if someone took tour groups through all of my beloved spots in Wellington; I wondered what would happen to those spots if everyone knew about them. After all, isn't the point of underground culture that it's difficult to find and hard to gain entry to? Anyway,I reasoned, the tour would probably not be worth the money (over 20 NZ dollars).
The sights we ended up seeing were the Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam (a heavily gilded Roccoco-era palace, with expansive and well-kept gardens), an exhibition of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist paintings (I was so tired by this point that I skipped right past the room containing a work by Jackson Pollock without a glance back), an exhibition of Bauhaus works, the Brandenburg Gate, a wander past the Bundestag (parliament building), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Checkpoint Charlie, a former part of the Berlin wall.
The things we didn't see, which I am still agonising about: a Pierre et Gilles retrospective, the East Side gallery, Lego Land, and any nightclub, bar or gig.
Berlin has a strange relationship with its troubled past. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a sincere, profound experience, which manages to convey - as much as is possible in a work of art - some of the sadness, the immensity and the sheer heaviness of what happened in the Holocaust. But the same tour brochure that offered the 'Alternative City' tour made a tour of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp site sound like a funfair. They were also evidently making quite a lot of money off it, and off their Berlin wall tours, which to me feels a bit icky.
And in the Memorial for the Murdered Jews, people were playing hide and go seek (so did we. It was actually quite fun, and an ideal site for it). At Checkpoint Charlie, there is a museum - and a museum shop, presumably with fun souvenirs of Communist East Germany to take home to the rellies. There was a lunchbar across the road called Snack point Charlie.
Possibly my naive Antipodean eyes see things through a lens of too much idealism, but it seems like the pain, shame and tragedy of Germany's history is being exploited (by some) as a tourist attraction.
But maybe that's just how it goes in Berlin.

I"m writing from Prague, which is probably the most beautiful place we've been in yet. It also has the worst train station, which was practically Third World, and is the least tourist-friendly. And, like everywhere else, the hostel is full of Australians.