Gauklerfest

Berlin is a city of street festivals, and last week was no exception. In addition to the International Beer Festival, there was also the Gauklerfest and the German-American Volksfest. Gauklerfest is another street festival, only this time it's focused on funny and crazy street performers. So in addition to the typical booths with crafts, beer, wurst and crepes, there were people walking around in crazy costumes and performing for your general entertainment. So, I pretty much loved it.

Card Tricks...

Please look behind the card tricks guy to the dashing man on the dinosaur...

True to Pied Piper style, after these rats were done performing, they started to lure the children away from the village...

 Dried Fruit

Creepy handcrafted fairies for your home decor...

This man kept going around and posing visitors for pictures. Of course, the visitors all kept laughing, at which point he would point angrily and say, "Stop laughing! I'm a serious photographer here trying to make serious art!" At which point everyone would laugh even harder.

His angry pose:

View of the Dom, the Humboldt Box, and the East German Fernsehturm  (television tower). Interesting story, the Fernsehturm was built by the DDR to prove their success and happiness to the world, and it's visibility across the wall definitely made it a central vantage point in the East. However, every day for a few hours when the sun shines on the tower, you can see a cross (slightly visible below) - an outcome not planned or wanted by the DDR. Berliners named this "Rache des Papstes", or "pope's revenge". Reagan also alluded to this phenomenon in his 1987 "Tear down this wall" speech.

Sangria

 After we walked by this booth, we were looking at our hands and talking about what the different lines meant. Suddenly out of no where, the hand reader was right behind us. She steps in between the three of us, declares "alles falsch!!" (all wrong) and then scampers impishly back to her tent. It was hilarious.