Europe Day 5: Berlin
the city on foot
Berlin in its monumental glory. From Oskar’s place I took a walk through the residential to the commercial part and all the way to where hordes of tour groups took over landmarks. I only had the morning, and I had the urge to walk them all. I got carried away: once I made it the Berlin Cathedral, I pushed on to Checkpoint Charlie, from there on to the Holocaust memorial, than the Brandburg Gate, then the Reichstag. I game-ified my walk - as if I was going to get hearts for every monument I took a photo of. It made me wonder where on the tourist personality scale I was: somewhere between loud landmark-selfie photo hunter and zen wide-eyed sponge-like flaneur?
On the way back, navigating the more working/residential sections, I felt more of Berlin - at ease with its many different personalities. I wanted to keep on walking, to soak up more of the everyday parts of the city, away from the landmarks. For all the wonder of seeing them up close, I was walking in search of that elusive feeling of being a local.
Or maybe I just kept walking in the hope that I would bump into my favourite podcast’s hosts, Musa and Ryan of @stadiofootball