my dad told jason that this is the best vacation he has ever been on. it is def unique and i agree it is up there. personally my best vacays are in australia. but this is good stuff.
i am embarrassed to say that i dont know much history about berlin. something i should have looked into perhaps before coming... too late now. i plan to do some research because being here makes me soooo curious. i dont need a history lecture, i will find out myself alright! ´
all throughout the city were bricks on the ground like in the photo below.
i know it runs paralell with the road, but it doesnt usually. it represents where the berlin wall was. it goes through parks, up to buildings where it picks up on the other side of them, wherever the wall was this is now there.
there is also a memorial to a few of the (hundreds of) people who got shot from the 60s to 1989 when the wall was around. they died trying to climb the wall and get back over to the west. there was barbed wire and land mines at the wall as well. the cross nearest the photo was for a man who was shot trzing to escape the east only months before the wall finally came down....
ok i looked some stuff up. 5000 ppl tried to escape east berlin, 100-200 actually were shot doing it.
this memorial is awesome. the photo does it zero justice as it is a million times larger than this with more rolling hills and stone bricks. each stone represents 25000 people who died during the holocaust. the stones go on and on for an entire block, maybe even more. they are not uniform in height, some are inches and some are 15 feet high and zou can get lost in here like a labrynth....
rico says there are not any names inscribed on the memorial because those names are too personal. there is not a description of the memorial because you are supposed to come up with zour own interpretation of what it all means. no one is aloud to lay out on the stones, but they just know this and respect it.
It consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The slabs are 7 ft 10 in long, 3 ft 1 in wide and vary in height from 8 in to 15 ft 9 in.
more info about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe
a historical city, a once in a lifetime vacay...
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