M and I went to Berlin last Thursday. I gave her tickets to the U2 concert a few months ago for her birthday. The concert was held in Olympiastadion. That place is huge. That is where Jesse Owens won 4 medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics. And if you remember from your film history class, where Leni Riefenstahl filmed Olympia.

Anyway, I’m not the biggest U2 fan but it was a pretty good concert. Lots of old hits. Lots of visuals and big video monitors. But…It was no Pink Floyd. Bono flew in from the G8 Summit in Scotland and reportedly flew back directly after the show. Ooooh. Rockstar.

On Friday and Saturday we walked around and did some shopping and sight-seeing. The weather was kind of dreary but it was good to see some history.

The one thing I noticed was that there were so many Americans there. I don’t mean tourists visiting but Americans actually living there. The guy who owned our apartments was from Darien, CT. The guy working at Starbucks. A waitress in a restaurant. There were a lot of hipsters that sounded like Americans as well. I even saw American skate punks and bums in the train station. Interesting.

However, there was one American in Berlin this past weekend that I didn’t meet.

The Holocaust Memorial is as stark as it is impressive.

This weekend was also the Deutscher Filmpreis ceremony in Berlin. I saw a bunch of German celebrities walking the red carpet at the Ritz-Carlton and getting into limos with paparazzi all over the place. I didn’t recognize any of them.

All in all Berlin is cool as hell and I would move there in a heartbeat if I had the details lined up.

Pictures below are from the Holocaust Memorial