Berlin

I'm in a backpacker hostel in Berlin and there's techno music coming from an indeterminable source...  Dresden was fantastic. The river divides the old and new towns. In the old town you can see amazing architecture and some tidy little museums,; in the new town you can see genuine German punks and wander the streets on a Friday night with a longneck Pilsner in hand... along with thousands of young locals. It's a great, if somewhat anarchic, atmosphere in the new town. This morning I was caught riding a Dresden tram without a ticket and was fined twenty euros on the spot - bummer. I arrived in Berlin early this afternoon, headed into the city and first visited Checkpoint Charlie, where you can pose and have your picture taken between an American and a Soviet soldier, although I didn't. I saw the Wall Museum, which is mostly concerned with the various means by which people escaped over, under, and around the wall. There are some pretty amazing stories involving homemade submarines, hot-air balloons and chairlifts, and lots of the designs are on display. I wandered North to the Brandenburg Gate, where there was some great big protest rally underway - I gather it was "anti-fascist". In response the German "Anti Konflikt Team" was out in force and they had actually cordoned off the gate itself so that protesters couldn't pass East into the pedestrian mall, although I was able to pass West into Tiergarten.  This pissed off a lot of feral lefty Germans, and it seemed strange to me... I stood around watching the protest speeches for a while but couldn't figure out what everyone was there for... There were a lot of kids wearing tin-foil headgear for some reason. I came back to the hostel and met the New Zealanders who I'm bunking with for the next few days - bummer. They all went on a guided pub crawl tonight, but I took myself out to Kreuzberg where I sat in a bar that styles itself as some sort of David Lynch nightmare - with candles and horses' heads - and watched soccer. And so now I'm back in the hostel and it's not even midnight.  These "party hostels" always make me feel like a boring fart. Tomorrow I go to the Art and Nostalgia Fair!