Yesterday was a very good day. Today was a lot less good. Didn’t get much done for various reasons, but it was still more or less interesting. Started going into the main thoroughfare and walking through an old antiquities swap meet. Got a neat WW2 medal. After some confusion and changes of plans I headed to the main place – Alexanderplatz, which is a major shopping and public gathering center with the massive Fernsehturm – the tallest building in Germany, and second tallest in all the EU. Construction on the tower was completed in 1969 and became symbol of Communist power and prestige in East Germany. Until last year, in 2017 it had the highest publicly available observation deck in the EU. It starts with an elevator ride to the observation platform, which is only barely above the halfway point of the tower’s height. It of course gives great views of all the surrounding land. But the elevator is neat because there is a clear window above which lets you see up into the lit elevator shaft as you go up. The whole height of the tower is 1,207 feet, and the observation room is 666 feet. The room just above the observation platform is a rotating restaurant. It was super, super crowded, as over 1,000,000 people go up the tower annually. But there is a ring with pictures and locations of all the famous sights around Berlin showing you where to look.

After that and figuring what else I had time for, I headed to the German Spy Museum. A cool museum all about the history (starting from the ancient Romans to modern times with of course a lot of focus on the Cold War), tools, poisons, sneakiness and the most famous spies in history. It also had a section on James Bond, and a neat laser maze where you have to tread through a room of lasers pointing all over, and you have to step carefully, dip, and climb over and crawl under lasers and reach the end without triggering any. There was tons and tons of hands-on encounters, that have you try to solve puzzles, and break encryptions, or break into safes, or deal with interference to listen in on conversations. It was really neat.

As for the post title… It’s completely true. No matter where you eat, anywhere in Germany, if you’re outside, there’s gunna be wasps hovering all over. I had one bothering me at lunch today, at a McDonald’s, I closed the box of my nuggets and the wasp just started crawling all over to get in and it just wouldn’t go away. I don’t know if it was a stinging kind, and I didn’t want to find out. I grabbed all my stuff and moved, and it just kept hovering right along with me. Eventually I was able to smack it to the ground stunning it. But every time, there’s always been a damn wasp. I saw 2 wasps in a Domino’s Pizza earlier, and saw several wasps crawling over donuts in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Ironically I just googled wasps in Berlin after typing this, and one of the search results was someone complaining about wasps in a Dunkin’ Donuts. They were even a nuisance on my last tip in Germany.