Berlin by Bike

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Berlin is an amazing city. Unlike in Paris, there's no noticeable racial tension. There's a feeling of liveliness that wasn't present in Paris. N.. recognized very little of Berlin from 20 years ago. N.. had visited Berlin shortly after the wall came down and stayed in the former East side. The city had a very different feel today. Many of the drab Stalin architecture buildings are gone, or covered over. The majority of primary tourist attractions are in the former East side, and very easy to visit.

Our new hotel was one street (block) East of the old Berlin Wall, very close to the old Checkpoint Charlie. Nothing, except for the Brandenburg Gate and the large TV antenna tower seemed the same. What a transformation! Evan the Reichstag has changed - it now has a giant condom on top.

The old East German built Trabant or Trabi is now a tourist draw. It used a highly polluting 2-stroke motorcycle engine that was the cause of much smog in the former East Germany. There's even a Trabi Safari company.

Berlin has a local fastfood speciality called Currywurst that's pretty well at every corner fast food outlet. It's a sausage in a hint of curry sauce drowned in ketchup. At least that's what we tasted. The ketchup is supposed to have a curry flavour. But, it's very mild and mostly tomato paste.

Berlin is flat with lots of Bike lanes ... So it's an ideal biking city. We got 3 bikes and rode all day from 10:00 until about 20:00 ... with pit stops for eating and drinking and sight seeing of course. W.. was great on his bike.

We visited Humboldt University, which was founded by the Humboldt brothers, as one Europe's early universities. Einstein taught there sometime in the early 30's.

We also visited the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, a geometric regular pattern of concrete blocks, explaining to W.. what happened before and during the 2nd European war of the 20th century. We didn't realize we were to stay on the ground. Most of the visitors were walking on top of the concrete blocks and not at ground level. There were no signs indicating what was verbotten.

W.. posed at the place where JFK once said, "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" or translated into colloquial German, "I am a Jelly Doughnut." Those were from times long ago, when presidents took pride in getting closer to nuclear anihilation just to show their machoness.

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