Berlin

With just two days in Berlin, I barely scratched the surface — are you sensing a theme here? But I very much enjoyed seeing and learning about this great city and its people.

I took two walking tours, one on each day, and the guides for both were top-notch. The first was a basic introduction to Berlin and its deep history.

In the photo below we are looking down, through a transparent tile, in the plaza where the first Nazi book burning took place in 1933. Although you can see only our relections, we could see into the basement of what was then the university library. The shelves are empty.

I stayed in a little apartment a short train ride (and then 15 minute walk) from downtown. Although I felt perfectly safe walking in that neighborhood, I did not want to be out by myself after dark. Therefore I missed seeing the evening light displays that were in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the wall coming down. But it was really the buzz of the town.

My second tour was titled “Alternative Berlin” and we took city transportation to several neighborhoods where we looked and learned about Berlin’s street artists, musicians, and the more…alternative… lifestyles.

It was so very interesting to hear about how the wall take-down and the reunification of Germany impacted this sector of the city.

My tour guide was very good about acknowledging the artists for many of the pieces we looked at, but I was unable to write it all down, so I’m including pictures without citations, with apologies to the artists.

There are definitely places we visited on this tour that I would like to have gone back to. But alas, in the blink of an eye I was finding my way back to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) to catch my train back “home” to Munich.