My first impressions of Berlin.

It has been four hours so far, and I've had breakfast and walked a few kilometers. Two things stand out to me. First, a huge number of people smoke here. But the thing that caught me off guard was that there is the sound of children playing everywhere.

I'm sitting by a river right now, listening to the shrieks of children playing coming from blocks away, and that seems to be a very normal sound of the city.