Coming back to Berlin on Friday night gave us a chance to spend a whole extra day walking around and just soaking up the city. Since we're staying in the old East Berlin this time around, we set off in the morning on a casual stroll through that neighborhood. It's a very intriguing mixture of past and present, with almost every street containing bold, new apartments and storefronts intermingled with still un-restored, bombed-out remains of a painful history. All the while, a seemingly endless stream of graffiti lines the first floor of the wall-to-wall buildings - some beautiful works of art, others hastily sprayed political statements. The people, as in any place, bear little mind to these surroundings (as they see them every day), but for us it wove together a striking and beautiful cityscape with more visible history than anywhere I've ever lived.
Later on that afternoon, on our way to dinner, Skick noticed that a few streets were blocked off, and a helicopter was hovering a ways away above the city. Curious, we decided to take a detour and find out what was happening. It was a good 8 blocks away before we started seeing rows and rows of police vans converging on an area just around the corner. When we turned the bend, we were engulfed in the thumping bass and loud chants of a political protest. We decided to follow it for a while, and made our way through hordes of college students waving flags, throngs of riot-police standing at attention, and more than a few clusters of recently pepper-sprayed kids recovering on the sidelines. The protest wasn't out of hand at all (just a few small pockets of over-zealous participants, as per any such event), and was very interesting to watch. It was also quite fitting to see since Berlin, saturated in political strife for years, has been a center of such demonstrations throughout many generations. We watched the protesters drum off into the distance, and headed on our way.
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