i want to ride my bicycle

i want to ride my bike... so eling and i decided the best way to check out the city was on a bike tour. we figured we'd get a good glimpse of all the important sites in the city, little did we know that we'd get a veritable history lesson spanning everything that involves WWI and the cold war. i really recommend the Fat Tire Bike Tour in berlin (they also have tours in barcelona and paris - and yes, maybe i accepted a bribe or two to mention them in my blog)... so the whole trip was full of sweet pics and useful tidbits of history, so i'll only post a few special ones in this space.

this is the first main stop i liked, here are fathers of communism (and yes, it's located in east berlin, somethin like Marx and Lenin square - go figure)... just to show you how large these two figures were i climbed up to the standing figure and showed it off. yes, i'm standin on one set of shoulders and barely come up to the other guys head. don't try this at home, i'm a trained professional - i'm even givin the thumbs up. and for those keepin score at home, eling might have had a little help gettin on his shoulders.

so the whole premise of this thing is to follow some dude and 20 of your newest friends around on matchin bikes for 4 hours - stopping every 10-20min to hear random facts and historical insight. this piece to our left is the last standing sniper tower. it's not necessarily in the exact spot (they moved it 20 yards so they could put up an apartment building) and it's not the only "lookout tower" but the last sniper tower. one soldier would man the tower with the instructions to shoot to kill. kinda a big responsibility for the 19 year olds that were up there.

so after the wall came down, the city planners had the big feeling that berlin was going to grow to the heights it had been before the wars. so since a lot of east berlin lay in ruins (thank you communist building plans), they knew they had to expand. they decided to go with the theory of "build it and they will come", well they built it - but no one came. so one of the main squares (postdam platz) is populated with "fake buildings" that are just scaffolding covered by paintings. it's a great way to create advertising space for a city in such a poor fiscal situation like berlin. take a close look at this storefront to your left. even passing by this at night i couldn't tell. in fact, looking at it now the only way i can tell (besides the fact that there'd be no other reason to take this pic) was the lights sticking out of the wood frame windows.

in case you were missing your celebrity and historical buildings, i thought i'd post this pic of the famous aldon hotel. in case most of you think you've seen this hotel before, you have. but the last time you saw it michael jackson was danglin his baby by the ankles off one of the balconies. yea, thought that'd interest you. go 'head, check out youtube. just search jacko baby window and you should get a great view of this hotel in action. oh the events that people remember.

ok, so my fearless travel companion for this portion (you might remember the lovely eling from the statues above) may or may not have much experience on a bicycle. trusted sources put in her scouting reports that her previous road time is about 30min to an hour. so going on a 4 hour trip was an experience. and you know what, she battled through it and came out on top. yea, she might have gotten scraped up a bit, but she took that lickin and kept on kickin (just like beyonce and those stairs). so this pic is a shoutout to her mad biking skills and the fact that she has an uncanny ability to remind me to phone home. oops... forgot to do that. i mean, jaws was never my scene and i don't like star wars. HI MOM!!! :)