Arrival to Berlin

A cold saturday afternoon, we arrived at Berlin. After 3 hours flight, we took to road the hotel which we booked before. The first experience about Berlin was it's cold and overcast weather. Even though it was four pm, it looks like night. By the time we took our transportation weekly tickets, little but important details attracted our attention as for instance, some signs and explanation signboards were in Turkish, so we considered as an influence of Turkish migration on daily life.

After the bus and arriving to the hotel, we walked around the neighborhood and also were looking for place to eat. During our little trip, we had to chance to make some observation around the region, Friedrichshain. For example, we saw lots of graffiti on the buildings, in addition "diner" and "kebab" restaurants on the street. However this situation didn't surprise us because it is a known fact that Turkish migrants had been living in Berlin and also germany for so many years and we can easily sat that Turkish culture is an inevitable part of the city. Additionally, we noticed their different concept of an architecture and learned important facts about it: Ampelmann has a hat, generally "male" and shown on pedestrian signals. When you look at the traffic lights you can see this man with a hat. Karl Peglau designed this figure for the color blindness because the light is flu and weak, hard to recognize the structure. In 1961's, The Ampelmann became a virtual mascot for the East German.

As the weather was cold, we kept walking fast and we arrived to the restaurant. We preferred a Russian restaurant, which may show us the multicultural structure of Berlin. During a nice dinner, we checked our schedule and made some arrangements about the places that we will make the meetings. We also sent an email to Kitev which has a projects like refugee kitchen. As soon as we finished our work and dinner, we came back to our hotel for a rest and wrote our fist day impressions.