Alemania 2: Larry Bird lives on on the Berlin wall

Berlin was cool for its historical sights. Because it got bombed silly in 1945, theres not a ton of stuff to look at, it's just not beautiful anymore. I enjoyed the east side gallery, a remnant of the inner wall which was the site of an international mural project. Since then people have chipped away pieces of it and layers and layers of additional art and scrawling have been added. Definitely, the old art is completely compromised, but when the medium is a wall part of the piece is that it will change over time, heterogeneously and for both better and worse. I like Che in the Che T-shirt. We went to the holocost memorial, a grid of conrete blocks of various heights. You can walk among them. Curiously, the interpretive museum said it was unlike most such memorials in that the sculpture itself does not emply symbols. WTF? Each concrete block has the approximate dimensions of a grave. The blocks are tall in the center, in fact the whole monument has a shape reminiscent of a heap od mass-disposed corpses. When you stand in the middle they tower over you. Each block is gray and drab, implying anonymity. I forget thee number of slaps but it was some odd number that I'm quite sure was not chosen at random. No symbols my ass, I wonder what they meant by that.
We were sort of looking for Hitler's bunker, which is, we were told under a parking lot. In the place where we thought it should be there was a new building. The Bunker is quite close to the memorial, and also to the Brandenburg gate where Hitler put on some of his famous rock concert light show speeches. The gate is a significnt site to say the least. Napolean made a big show of marching into it, and Hitler made a big show of marching out of it. The arriving American troops also came into a bombed out wreckage city throught the damaged gate. it was stranded in the death strip between the two parallel walls for decades. now you can walk through it again. Also nearby is the parliament building with its recently added clear domed roof to replace the one destroyed by bombing so many years ago. As we left a group of 100 people in costumes sort of danced into a line on the lawn, playing loud techno music and mooned us. I think the government was the target but we got caught int he cross fire.