According to our guide, today was an unusually hot day for Berlin. It was in the mid to uppers 80s! And we spent a large part of the day walking around Berlin. I am not complaining, just stating a fact that it was hot.
We saw so many sites today that it would take me forever to list and comment on all of them, so I am going to highlight some with pictures and a few words.
We started the day at the Victory Column, which commemorates the Prussian defeat of Denmark in 1864.
Later, we walked through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. That is the full name of the memorial given by the Germans, acknowledging that what happened during the Holocaust was, indeed, a crime. It was a moving experience walking through the concrete monoliths.
The Brandenburg Gate was another stop during our tour. Probably one of the most famous landmarks of Berlin, it is at the former border of East and West Berlin. Needless to say, a lot of history occurred in front of that gate.
Next, we saw the Reichstag, which is Germany's parliament building. Although the shell of it is historic, the entire inside has been modernized, and the building is topped with a modern glass dome.
In several places, we also saw the location of the Berlin Wall marked on the ground with bronze plaques and cobblestones.
Later, we stopped at the Berlin Wall Memorial, where there is a preserved stretch of an intact Wall section. The police van in the photograph of the hole in the way was beautiful luck! I heard a vehicle approaching, and I wanted something interesting to see through the wall. So I waited to take the picture, and I was delighted that it was a police van. Visual poetry!
For lunch, we ate at Lowenbrau, and I enjoyed Leberkase, potato salad and a piece of lettuce, which we jokingly said was the German version of a fresh green salad, since German food is typically very heavy.
The last photograph is a reflection of an austere East German building in the side panel of a Citroen Picasso.
