Freetouring Part I

Berlin and Amsterdam were among the first cities I've been to where I didn't have someone to show me around, so I did something pretty drastic. I ignored the sympoms of TIS (tourist identity syndrome) and took a series of *gasp* tours. But I still feel like I stuck to some semblance of my principles, because the guides worked on a tip-only basis. Ostensibly, this means if they do a good job, you reward them. What it really means is that if you're a cute girl and/or have a sweet accent, you make more money.

Almost every tour turned out better than I expected, but the Berlin ones were especially insightful into what the city means on a level beyond the first glimpse of the "temporary immigrant." Some of the highlights:
-Hitler's bunker: the Germans commemorate the place where the Führer died by having their dogs crap and pee on an otherwise unmarked spot of land.
-Scottish accent: That's right.
-The Brandenburg Tor....made out of chocolate.
-Stories: One involved a tragic love tale impeded by the Wall. The guy, in West Berlin, decides to find a girl in his part of the city that looks exactly like his true lover, stuck in East Berlin. He dates this second girl for a while, then convinces her to take an outing to East Berlin. After wining and dining she takes a nap. He sneaks away with her documents, finds his true lover, and using the West German girl's documents they run off to happiness in West Berlin. Unfortunately, they both end up in jail for seven (I think) years because the West Berlin girl's father was a powerful politician. I wasn't sure where my sympathy was supposed to lie in all this, so I just thought about the chocolate shop again...
Also noteworthy was how the Wall fell: basically the DDR's press secretary missed the meeting before the press conference and had to read from his colleague's notes. Reminds me of my old high school English class days.

I took a second tour called Alternative Berlin, which was as cool as it sounds. Basically we looked at alot of the city's graffiti (and learned about specific artists), squatter settlements, and other random stuff. Unfortunately my camera's batteries died so I couldn't take pictures, but my visually evocative prose should do the trick. Highlights:
-We passed a club with a sign that said No Dress Code and were promptly informed that this meant, not a tolerant policy, but in fact that you weren't allowed to wear more than underwear. Considering the lack of sun in Berlin, I hope they at least allow sunglasses. Next door was an "illegal" club in an abandoned factory.
-My favorite graffiti artist was identified by his cartoon-esque Lucy character, who is always depicted killing her cat. Two winners were one where she is putting the cat in a toaster (legs as "slices") and another where the cat is saying, as it is pulverized, "It almost doesn't hurt anymore." This is alot funnier when it's in German and has taken you a couple seconds to decipher, so START LAUGHING!


-Finally, another story. We visited an actually legal squatter settlement. The residents had won this status thusly: every owner of the land had been unable to develop it because the squatters would riot and burn cars when any workers came to build. So the latest owners decided to hire a crime boss from Kosovo(!) to get rid of the squatters. So he set about making them an offer they couldn't refuse, but the ensuing sketchy/violent means of persuasion caught the police's eye, who started uncovering this guy's war crimes in Kosovo. So he got scared and sold the land (which is worth millions of euros) for 30,000 for 30 years and took off. So now the squatters own the land, sort of, and there's apparently nothing the real owners can do about it. And no cars were harmed in the making of this story.