Slept a whole 9 hearty hours last night, finally my head has been a lot clearer than yesterday. My legs were still bitching and moaning though. Hopefully, in a couple of days, I would get used to this unusually long duration of walking, lose a few pounds would be even better (wait until you see my dinner tonight).

I have done a lot today actually. Starting my day with a coffee and pastry, I love the gazillion cafes here and their pastries, Asia has that too. I mean, America really needs to catch up in the pastry department, we need much more than that freaking Au Bon Pain. Those little pastries with cheese, with little sausage, bacon bites, were delicious and helped me get through the day. My first stop was the what I previously thought it was the Holocaust Memorial. They call it a different name (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) here. A powerful memorial. Blocks and blocks of black stones lining uniformly to a direction. They were weighting down into the ground. It is not a cemetery but a vivid depiction of how it was like for Jews back in those Nazis days (at least that was how I felt). When I walked in between those stones, the stone blocks became higher and higher, until you became so small, the sky was closing in, your heart felt like you were in jail and you wanted to escape. That was the powerful part of this memorial. Until the next seconds, I scared a couple women who walked a different direction. Those bitches interrupted my spiritual experience!


After the Murdered Jews Memorial, I wanted to visit the Salvador Dali Museum since it was in the area, but they did not open until noon. I switched to go to see the Berlin Wall Memorial instead, thanks to U-bahn and S-bahn, they are so easy to use. The Berlin Wall Memorial is another heavy weight memorial. I thought that was really good and it was free, I even shed a few tears as I read about the last night when the East German soldiers opened all gates, and thousands and thousands of people just walked into the West Berlin at that time, rejoined with their other German fellow men, shouting, hugging. Reunion is a powerful thing. Even though there was a whole history course out there about the post-WWII Germany, the Soviet and the West during the Cold War, it is difficult to understand how they could do what they did to their own people, and how much damage it had done to the city and the nation.


After lunch, I went back to the Dalí – Die Ausstellung am Potsdamer Platz. I didn't plan to see this museum actually. But I found a discount coupon for it in the Welcome guide that came with my 3 days travel pass. A frugal man like moi can never refuse a coupon obviously, so I now had to go! I like his works, I like his insanity and genius all melted together. I thought I would see a lot of clocks, instead I saw a lot of butterflies, sexuality, penises, animals became human, human with open drawers, open drawers contained emptiness, lots of lines, lots of gigantic breasts and bottoms so big that it needed a wooden y-shaped stand to support it. The main subject is not the focus here but the shadow became wolf with knife or the little man at the corner exploded with bloods splashed. Is that violent or is that passion? Hard to tell. An almost dried up ant-eater-headed queen was fucking a king in the back, well that I called provocative. I just liked his humors in some of the works, kind of dark but brilliant.


I did my vinyl duty too, visited a few (I mean "A FEW") record shops before and after I visited the Dome of Reichstag Building, the German Parliament building. That's another amazing structure by the way and it has a magnificent view of Berlin. It was a rainy day though, so my reserved sunset time slot was kind of wasted. Oh well, I still enjoyed it a lot.


Dinner, thanks to Jen's suggestion on facebook, was at Gambrinus meets Bacchus near Oranienburger Straße. Another German dinner, I started off with Berliner Kartoffelsuppe (a Berlin potato soup with crayfish), main course I had Rindergulesch Bourdeaux mit Spatzle (a Beef goulash with German homemade pasta) and like I had not stuffed myself enough, I had a Kaiserschmarrn (German crepe with vanilla ice cream). A 3-course meal cost 23 euro, cannot beat that!


Look at other photos from Day 2 here.