surveying the wall

friday -the weather had been reasonable all week but by the time friday rolled around it was spectacular. sunny and 75, a nice breeze and also the day that we had to leave. blast. after trying for a couple of days to get a flight back to koln on saturday morning, (instead of taking the train -the flight was cheaper, but left us too little time before the big flight) we decided to take the night train which left friday night. that ment that we would skip out on the trip out to potsdam, which is where the summer palaces of the royals were built. instead we would do some shopping around prenzlauer berg and get out tickets for the train (as resevations were required for the night train) it turned out to be much more difficult to find a ticket office than we had imagined and it was too late to buy them on the internet. did a bit of shopping and packed up the apartment and headed over to the eastern train station to buy the tickets in person in case we had to leave on an earlier train then we had expected (7pm versus 12am). we bought the tickets for midnight, stashed the bags in a locker and headed out to get some dinner in the friedrichshain neighborhood that i had explored yesterday. along the way we randomly found the remains of the berlin wall which is known as the east side gallery these days. wandering around the remains of the wall as the sun was setting was to say the least a moving experience. rob and i talked about how crazy it was that almost everyone we had met and hung out with had grown up with the wall and the culture associated with it. the wall was 160m long when it was built and currently there is less than 1.5m left, most of it has been used to fill in potholes in the bombed out streets the rest has been scavenged, sold or is being housed in museum collections. afterwards we got some dinner, witnessed a german bridal shower, waited for a late train, ate at le-crobag, shopped for some books, cleared customs and flew back to america. we arrived back at the apartment in brooklyn, all in all 24 hours later.