Berlin

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This morning we hit the road at 6am and had breakfast on the bus. We had a lot of driving to do today, had a couple of stops and lunch at a truck stop -yum. Mid-afternoon we reached the Polish/German border then finally arrived in Berlin and started straight off with a driving tour of the city. First stop was the East Side Gallery which is part of the Berlin Wall that has been graffiti’d/decorated. We saw the Brandenburg Gate, Parliament House, the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his baby over the balcony, the Holocaust Memorial and other buildings. We had a walking tour planned for the next day so we went to our camp and set up. It was a beautiful river side site and the showers were great- clean and hot.

The next morning we did the Third Reich walking tour of Berlin with Edo from Berlin Walking Tours (definitely a plug here as they were fantastic). It was about a three hours long and on of the most interesting tours we did. On the tour we stood above the site of Hitler’s bunker which is now filled in with concrete (interestingly enough, the sight is not marked what-so-ever so unless you were being shown around you would have no idea where it was, apparently this is so it doesn’t become a shrine for Neo-Nazi’s), we saw what’s left of the old train station, a bomb shelter, we learned how Hitler built 17 copies of the Brandenburg Gate and camouflaged the real one so that it wasn’t destroyed and how all 17 fake gates were bombed and the real one still remains (a terrible man but certainly not stupid). We then saw the Holocaust memorial and after it was built it was discovered that underneath the site is where Goebbel's (Hitler's 2nd in charge) was and that the waterproof paint used on the monument was supplied by the same company that gave Hitler the gas that was used in the gas chambers! Not what really the memorial they had set out to make. We then walked to Checkpoint Charlie which was one of the entrance/exits from east to west Berlin. We were amazed at how history has affected this place and how the Germans have grown. They have acknowledge the things that have happened, there are constant reminders all around them which they show respect for, yet they are able to overcome it and live in the present and look at the future with a lovely optimism.

After the walking tour we were let loose. We had lunch at a pub and us girls tried the local beers; steins, red (raspberry flavour) and green (citrus). They were pretty good (huge). We didn't have too long, but we had a look at the Checkpoint Charlie museum and wandered around the streets for a while. We managed a spot of shopping and bought some souvenirs and then we caught the tram to the meeting spot and all had dinner at the restaurant.

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Photos

One of west Berlin's iconic buildings
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (in German: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche). The spire damaged by bombs in 1943.

Berliner Gruselkabinett bunker
Air raid shelter during WWII

The first traffic lights
in Continental Europe erected at Potsdamer Platz (1924)

Red marble
Blood red, sometimes purple, the marble’s colour was signed off by Hitler himself. It decked his grandest building, the New Reich Chancellery on Voßstraße now reused on the walls of the Subway Station U-Bahnhof "Mohrenstraße"

German Stiens
Bigger than our heads!