Please step this way....

Buying personal hygene products at a large department store is a daunting experience. Especially when you're obviously a backpacker from both your smell and your oversized novelty backpack. They look at you with sympathy and shuffle you over to the "rite price" area.

Anyhow, I left after paying 40 NZD for a tube of shower gel and shampoo - both small and compact, just like the camp bag I was given.

Yesterday was spent wandering around the city just following our noses. It was Emile's last day in Germany, so he went off and did some of his own sights for the afternoon while I did some window shopping.

However today was a lot more eventful. After avoiding tours like the plague since I convinced myself that I'm above them, I went on a free 3 and a half hour tour of historical Berlin, and afterward it has changed my opinion about tours. I still don't see myself buying an SLR camera and fanny pack (bum bag) with loud t-shirts, but it gave a heap of background to what I thought was an otherwise big city. We did the tour of the Brandenberg gate, which was next to the highlight of the tour - the Adlen hotel where Michael Jackson hung the baby out the window. That was fantastic. After the historial "pause" of Berlin with the guide making wisecracks at the expense of the French, we charged along to to Jewish Memorial. The grounds have large uneven (deliberate) concrete blocks placed in a roughly ordered fashion, in order to look like a jewish graveyard with headstones/tombstones.

Also on the tour was Hitler's bunker..... buried under a carpark and apartments. There's no plaque or board indicating such a site. The idea goes that they didn't want a bunch of Neo-Nazis coming over (most likely from Christchurch) and making a shrine out of it.

Further wanders around the city included the something or other of Terror, lots of museums, a chocolate shop, a sandwhich bar with perhaps the only free toilet in Berlin (and even better, free drink refills). All the places that I went to you can read all about in plenty of other places. Things you probably won't read about is why the city smells like sewerage everwhere and I dunno if I'm being an obvious... Oswald, but since the city was built on a swamp, there are always problems with flooding and swerage so it's always like this. I'm also told that people say the smell of Berlin is unique and it's what keeps people here. Maybe....

My travels over the next few days are reasonably busy, which will include a couple of days to the southwest of Berlin to a town called Leipzig, then back to Berlin for a concert on Saturday, then a train or plane to Amsterdam on Sunday and stay the night there. On Monday, it's back to London to sort out some book keeping bizzo before I start work back at the coal face again.