Thursday, August 30, 2007

Ich Bin Ein Berliner - Day 2

Friday morning. We woke up at a reasonable hour and got moving. We just started walking. We really didn't know what all the stuff to see was. We had some tourist maps that showed where the important stuff was. There was a really tall pointy thing in the distance, we figured we start by walking towards that. While walking that way we made our way to the river which runs through the city. We saw a gorgeous old church, bridges, wonderful architecture, boats traveling along. At this point we could not see the tall pointy thing, so we walked along the river. The main road was up ahead and at that point we saw the tall pointy thing.

(Old church = Berliner Dom)

(tall pointy thing = Fernsehturm)

There was a park before the Fernsehturm with a cool fountain in it.

We then walked past the Berliner Dom that I showed before and came upon the Lustgarten and the Altes Museum. There were a lot of tourists around.

(Statue of Frederick the Great)

We walked down the 'Unter den Linden' or 'under the linden trees' which took us to the infamous Brandenburg Gate. It is neat to see all these things first hand. It makes all the history we've been taught over the years so much more real. After the gate we walked north and passed the parliament building, the Reichstag. Berlin is, after all, the capital of Germany.

We ate some lunch at a Italian restaurant. They spoke Italian to us and German and English and it was terribly confusing. The food was great though. After lunch we went up to a Berlin wall memorial. Shown above is a piece of the remaining Berlin wall and the 'death strip.' This is the view from former West Germany.

Before sleeping we stopped at several bars, including a lovely East German bar complete with socialist propaganda and Lenin and all that wonderful oppressive government paraphernalia that just warms your heart. There is more, I'll just add another post. -Eric

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