Auf Wiedersehen Berlin

January 11^th

Today we went to Berliner-Schultheiss-Kindl Brewery. Although comparable in size to the Reudnitzer Brewery that we toured yesterday, it was a very different tour. First off, the tour guide brought us into where the mash tuns and lauter tuns were, but unlike other breweries, it was set up for tours—built-in chairs surrounded a projector screen that dropped from the ceiling; rather than talking to us directly, we had headphones and a receiver so he could talk through a microphone; a power point and video obviously professionally made for tours. Although the power point was very interesting and helped to visualize the brewing process, I felt like the video was just a giant advertisement for their brands—quite different from Reudnitzer. Much of the tour was looking through windows and we weren’t allowed to take pictures which made me wonder what they might be trying to hide; what we did see was very similar to Reudnitzer though. After the tour we went to a tasting room to try some of the beers that they offered. The tour guide just kept bringing us different types of beer, one after the other. Although we also had some super delicious bratwurst and potato salad, he was bringing out regular sized beers and I simply couldn’t drink that much.

After the brewery adventure, we had a few hours of free time which a few other people and I chose to spend at the “Erotik Museum”. Although it wasn’t quite what I had expected, I still found it really interesting. There was a lot of art depicting different sexual things and a lot of old sculptures that different cultures might’ve used for whatever reason (education or art mainly). There were also random odds and ends such as replicas of different chastity belts and tons of random phalluses (even some with wings). We then took a quick walk through KaDeWe—the second largest department store in Europe. It was not really what I expected—it was pretty much a HUGE Macy’s with every name brand of everything ever—bags, dishes, jackets, clothes—as well as a supermarket with tons of food.

At about 5pm, Gudrun told us to meet up because she was taking us somewhere. We walked and walked and ended up at a museum of sorts that commemorated those who fought against the Nazis. We got there only about 20 minutes before we closed so we had to zoom through the place but the parts we saw were super interesting. I wish we had known about it earlier because perhaps we could’ve found some more time to go. It was located in a building next to where those who planned to assassinate Hilter were executed.

We then went to Lemke’s Braueri where we had a prepaid dinner. They started by bringing us samples of all four of their beers—a pilsner, a weizen, a winter bock, and the original. The pilsner was banana-y, the weizen was sour, the original was bitter, and the bock was ok but not my favorite so I ended up handing off the rest of them to others. The dinner was a mushroom soup to start, and some sort of meat with potatoes and carrots—sort of a deconstructed stew. The mushroom soup was delicious but I didn’t care much for the meat so I mainly ate potatoes and carrots—luckily I was still pretty full from lunch. After dinner we took a double decker bus to the hotel (super fun!) and then I packed while watching Spongebob Schwamkoff and went to bed early for our early train ride to Munich in the morning. Auf Wiedersehen Berlin!

**Note: I've tried multiple times to add pictures to this post but it has (obviously) been unsuccessful, so I'm just going to post it anyway