Germany, Berlin

Spent the day exploring this interesting and just a little bit different, city. I think Berlin is a paradox - it's a bit homogenised, it could be any city in any western country. Visually, there is nothing that makes it stand out. Look from any high point and you'll soon notice the uniformity, the lack of any old, big or tall buildings. There are no cathedral spires on this town. And this is the very thing that makes it different. Scratch the surface, look a bit closer and this is where you see the real difference. Not surprisingly, there is only a smattering of buildings that predate the 1940's....we trained and walked to the Brandenburg gate, there is a lot of history in this area of Berlin. There are stories and old photos everywhere, on boards outside buildings, on boards on pavement outside where buildings once stood, on boards in parks. Just everywhere. There is no sense of hiding from what Germany once was. We were walking along a street and stopped to read one of the many boards to discover it was where Hitlers' bunker was. Just in a street, near a house. We walked on to the Reichstag and had seen plenty of photos on postcards of what it looked like after it had been bombed - to see it now, rebuilt, is quite amazing. It is a huge, dominating structure. It would have made such an impressive backdrop to events that occurred there. To walk those streets and imagine what it must have been like to live there and then after the bombings is confronting but nowhere as confronting as the holocaust memorial we went into. We all know the things that happened but to read the stories of individuals, people with names, it was shocking.
We decided to walk back to our hotel through the Teagarden, and enormous public park in the centre of the city. It turned out to be quite a hot day after morning rain and a large number of people were taking advantage of the sun with a spot of nude sun baking in the park. Finished our walk with a few drinks on a roof top bar over looking the remains of a bombed out Cathedral near our hotel. It has been restored and left as it was after the war as a reminder. There are plenty of those in this town.Read more