Berlin, Germany | Travel Photography

Once upon a time I went to Europe for a week and a half and never showed anyone the pictures. Yeah. This July. On my birthday. Whoops. After spending 4 or 5 days relaxing in Boston with friends, I flew to Berlin on July 5th to go visit my little sister Claire and my best friend Audrey. Claire was living in a cute little apartment with her German boyfriend for a month in Berlin, and Audrey had been studying abroad in Tübingen for the past four months. What followed was a frantic one-week German adventure – spent in both Berlin and Tübingen with a variety of friends from all over the globe (I ran into some people in Tübingen who I went to elementary school with). My friend Aleks from Boston came with me on the trip – and kindly used his United 1K status to fly us in business class overseas BOTH ways. Pretty awesome. We spent three nights in Berlin. I took pictures at random – probably not documenting things as well as I should. We went out to a fun nightclub one night in East Berlin and ended up having to walk home at 3am because the trains had stopped running – and of course I never had my camera with me for that experience. Those would have been some interesting pictures. Oh well. Anyway, this was the view from my sister’s apartment

We had some fun walking around in the park nearby on the day we arrived. We were too jet lagged to do much else

On the second day there, we decided to go to the Berlin Zoo. It was incredible. By far the most fascinating zoo I’ve ever been to. I’ll spare you from the million zoo pictures I took though – here are just a few of my favorites. (Secret fact about myself: I love tigers.)

Saw this statue next to the giraffe exhibit… not sure why it was there? But then again I didn’t understand much of anything since it was all in German

The zoo is right in the middle of the city – pretty neat. It’s basically just a gigantic park

We also went into the aquarium – which had fish/sharks, reptiles, amphibians and insects. It was nuts. They had things I never even knew existed, including a 5 foot long giant salamander from somewhere in South America. Wish I had a picture of it. I don’t. Instead I have a photo of a butterfly. Ha

After the zoo we wandered around the city for a while in search of food. Luckily we discovered curryworst. I love German food

On the third day we visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum, learning more about the history of Berlin and the Berlin Wall than we thought was possible

Once our heads were full of facts and depressing personal stories, we decided to explore the area near the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag

From there we continued to wander aimlessly. We walked right past the Berlin Fashion Week that was happening RIGHT THEN and I was tempted to be really creepy and try to sneak myself in, but Audrey and Aleks discouraged me from this. Sigh

And then we found the Holocaust Memorial. It was huge and fascinating and beautiful and sad, all at the same time

Further wandering brought us to Potsdamer Platz and the area near the Sony Center. Some of the new architecture in the area was just fascinating

We finally went inside the Sony Center and decided to eat dinner there – at an Australian restaurant of all places. We ate kangaroo. It was awesome

The following day we flew down to southern Germany to see where Audrey had been living for the past four months! I’ll blog those pictures in a separate post. :)