The Rest of Berlin

I hadn't had plans of visiting anywhere specific in Germany prior to my trip, and still wasn't too excited once I realized my route would take me through Berlin. Then I started talking to people, it started in London and continued in every conversation along the way, people who had been to the city raved about Berlin like no other place in Europe.
The first day we wandered around town, through the old buildings and the open squares, not too sure what we were looking at. We stumbled across and explored around an independent artist co-op, Tacheles, supposedly one of the last in Europe but looking to be shut down and demolished any day.
The next day we took a free city tour around East Berlin. That's when the buildings came to life. The sequence of events in the last century alone has molded the alternative city into what it is today. Hearing the stories of the hundreds of thousands standing up in peaceful protest when others had been killed for doing the same thing just days before was quite moving. The amount of energy that filled the city with those protests is still apparent walking the streets today, only now it is freely redistributed towards causes like creativity and enjoying life.