Berlin is a city of change. The tourist sites are mostly related to WWII and it's aftermath, peticulary the Berlin wall and the face of Communism that it stood for to the west for so long.

Since the city was completely leveled in the war, it was reconstructed basically as a few different sectors. Today, it is clearly distictive as to where the American, British, and East German areas were for the 60 or so years following the war until the wall fell in 1989. Today, Berlin is seeing growth and investment, peticulary construction, like no other city in western Europe. Berlin will be the host city for the World Cup 2006 and Germany is determined to bring it back to it's historical status as a major capital city similar to Rome or London. It is one of the most vibrant and fun cities including a great bar and club scene as good as any where. Due to it's seperate sectors for so long, Berlin is massive in size, covering 8 times as much area as Paris.

Fortunately for me, I met some really cool people in Berlin, mostly Australian's doing a tour called Busabout, which is an on/off bus that does a clockwise loop around Western Europe. The best night was when we all went out to dinner together, naturally for Thai food (which was just as good as in DC), then found a little hip bar called 99 cent bar, which, as it's name states, serves all drink for 99 euro cents, which goes unsaid as being trouble. From there at 3am we went tromping around the neighborhood searching for a club, which we never found, so we just ended up got some doner kebabs (think gyros), and went back to the hostel around 6am.....Good times!! :)

Krakow is a very cool city, it's a university town of about 700k, and wasn't destroyed in the war, so the old town centre is still in it's original structure, similar to Prague. I went to Auschwitz from here as a day trip. This was the largest concentration camp during WWII, that was a very sobering experience. It is incredible to see the sheer size of the complex in person and they had an excellent museum that would take a few days to go through properly. It's very hard to describe how being there makes you feel, it just kind of reminds you how recent it really was and makes you wonder how such a horrible thing could happen.