Maeventures: Berlin Walking Tour June 2010

Berlin is a much larger city than it initially appears and we're not really sure how to navigate it, so we decide to take a walking tour in English.

Most of this post discusses history and the tour, but there were 2 funny things that happened that I'll talk about first.

1) The free coca-cola truck.
My friend Lindy is obsessed with coke. Usually diet, but at a particularly sweltering point in the tour where we were seriously lacking shade, we hear "Free Coke" and I've never seen Lindy beeline with such purpose. She was one of the first in line for a Coke Zero (it then took me about 10 minutes to get to the front of the line and I almost lost the tour):

2) The Bier-bike.
Apparently for German bachelor parties, you can rent a bier bike. It's a fabulous float-type, bike-pedaled, keg-holder that travels through traffic just like a car with many people hanging off of it. It's quite a spectacle. I believe the guy on the front in the ballerina outfit standing on a keg is the bachelor:

Also, it was a gorgeous sunny day, apparently the first in awhile, and the parks were packed with people sitting out on the grass, just doing happy park day things.

The tour itself was a living history lesson--one I won't forget. Our tour guide grew up in East Berlin before the wall came down--an added plus that made this tour extra fascinating. She's a huge history buff and I learned more about Berlin and the history of Germany in 4 1/2 hours than ever before.

We start near the Berlin Cathedral, a spectacular Protestant Cathedral, with lush green grass all around it. The grounds are in fact so lush, they're actually called the Lust Garden (translates to Pleasure).

The cathedral, museums and pretty fountains are located on "Museum Island" and as amazing as this all is, it's just crazy to see and hear how much of it was all bombed during WWII. Some buildings are new, but some buildings have partially new parts (you can see the difference in brick vs. stone in some of the buildings - not shown).

As I'm sure you can imagine, there's a huge war theme to the beginning of this tour, but it's incredibly interesting. The memorial above is the Neue Wache, The National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny. Instead of a soldier, it's a mother holding her dying child. It's open air, so she is outside with the weather.

It can be argued that the Brandenburg Gate is one of the most photographed and famous landmarks in Europe. It's been said to represent the reunification of the city of Berlin after the wall came down.

A great deal of the tour focuses on the Berlin Wall--although to the East Germans, the wall was called the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.

The remains of the wall can be seen throughout the city as cobblestone blocks that break up sidewalks (almost always without the plaque, but this is the only time I took a picture of it).

We ventured to the subway to see the Ghost Stations--basically during the years of the Berlin wall, trains passed through stations that were blocked off. These stations are marked by the special letters (this one says Unter den Linden).

We also visited the Holocaust Memorial, which was really interesting. It was many different sizes and shapes of concrete blocks that all filed in together. Pictures can't really show how cool it is, but an aerial view is below:

It was very labyrinth-like to walk through it--you couldn't see your friend if he or she disappeared past another block. Some say that this is a way to interpret what it was like to lose / not know where your family was.

Another part of the tour takes us past buildings that had been bombed, shot at or seen their fair share of shrapnel. Sometimes it was small bullet holes, but in the case below, the hole was bigger than my hand.