Al's City-Break in New Berlin

You may have noticed that, in RL, I rather like my city-breaks. And so it is in SL, too. New Berlin has been around a while now, but as with so much else, it has passed me by - until now. Berlin? A buzzing city, with a chequered history... it should be interesting.

New Berlin spans 2 sims and features a number of familiar Berlin landmarks (assuming you are familiar with Berlin landmarks). The most striking of these are Alexanderplatz and the Fernsehturm TV tower - both, incidentally, located in the former East Berlin. If you pop along to the Berlin in SL website, you will find details of the other buildings and parks to be seen here.

I am not really too sure what to make of the build. As far as I can see, it does not seem to be sponsored by the city of Berlin itself and although it has been open for some months, it appears very much to be a "work in progress." My guess is that it is privately-sponsored, with much of the cost being offset by hosting areas for German companies who would like to be seen as part of the Berlin scene. Examples include TVB, a local Berlin TV company, and Solar Lifestyle, a company based in Berlin, with their Solar Obelisk, which was unveiled in SL and RL on 29th June. Though I would point out that the RL obelisk is actually in Kassel. I have included a couple of pictures of the obelisk below:


There are a lot of nice details in this build, and much to discover. However, despite the fact that the sim is strongly themed, I did not get a strong feeling of coherence about it. I will be the first to confess that this may be due to my ignorance of the RL area in question - photos on wikipedia reveal that it looks quite an accurate representation- but to me it lacked a certain something.