Berlin - Intro

2005 July 6th - 10th

Berlin was an unexpected and very pleasant surprise.



In Europe no one really gives a toss about Germany or the Germans. They are rich and speak a language full of sounds that no one can imitate. [If you're British, then you just can't imitate any other sounds than the ones of the English language]. It is a country that no one ever plans to visit for a holiday, unless you wanna do a bit of whips-and-chains and leather sex tourism in Berlin.

As well and very unfortunately, as a nation, they haven't been very nice in the past, and that as any other prejudice, will always be there to speak against them. Even nowadays, it's not unusual the association between the words "Nazi" and "German" or "Germany".



I feel as if the Germans were still trying to get away from the stigma of what the country represented during WW2. The amount of Jewish memorials and in-your-face references might look a bit excessive, if remembering the Holocaust could ever be an excess.

[Going one step further, if the African powers were as strong as the Jewish ones, the Western world and Lisbon especially would be full of memorials remembering the systematic human rights violations that occurred over 4 centuries, with slave trade.]

Anyway, if I had had any prejudices about the Germans, they would have completely disappeared around my Barcelona years when I had the opportunity to share space with some Erasmus Germans. And that was brilliant.

[This chronicle is drifting now: it should be about my holiday in Berlin. It's an interesting subject though and I will get back to it soon.]