Actually, I’m not a donut, but I have never seen so many Dunkin’ Donut franchises in all my life!
Thanks to the royal wedding, Easter and Mayday all coinciding this year, I got 11 days off for the price of 3. After a weekend in Swindon I hopped on a plane to Berlin for 5 days to seethe city everyone raves about and catch up with two friends from NZ – Oli (living in Dresden) and Xander (studying in Sweden). Both were old hats of the city and were great tour guides to have. Oli booked us into a hostel in Kreuzberg, close to the Spree, the East Side Gallery and lots of cool little cafes and bars.
As everyone knows, the city was split in half for years - East and West. There was a huge amount of history on display everywhere we went - from the 18th Century through to WWII and the reunification. I’m having a brain malfunction right now because Glee is on in the background so I apologise if I mess up any of my facts! There were great Linden trees everywhere which made the city seem very green, and this with the Col-War style buildings, what remained of the old Prussian architecture, the grand museums, churches and Hamburg University, and the constant graffitti and street art, made for a unique city.
Above is a picture of the media tower that the East Berlin government built – almost as a beacon over the city to show West Berlin what they could do, as much as for the state media. And of course, Marx and Engels on the left. I tried to get up on his knee but wasn’t tall enough to get up.
The middle building above is the Pergamom Museum (more on that in a later post) where you can see shell damage from WWII in the columns. There were extensive renovations going on at many of the sites we visited, and damage from the war 65 years on was still evident.
Brandenburg Gate in the rain, keeping the tourists away!
Pictured above is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a Holocaust memorial with a name that is fairly self-explanatory. I really liked the memorial itself, and it felt very calm and peaceful. I gather this is not what it is meant to convey but there was a cool stillness that made me feel very tranquil - possibly because the rain had stopped and there were laughing children running in between the concrete pillars playing tag and hide-and-seek. Even so, the memorial definitely left an impression on me.
And just round the corner was a carpark with an unobtrusive sign indicating that this was the site of Hitler’s bunker. It had long been filled in and no building can be built there so it cannot become a place for Nazism to rise again.
The Reichstag was closed! Well, not really, but there was a new policy that meant we had to apply online to go in, at least 3 days in advance. So, I got to take lots of photos of the outside (check out more on the Picasa album,) and ponder the history and how on earth Cristo managed to wrap it up like a present.
Since I took SO MANY PHOTOS. So I will do a few posts on Potsdam, Museum Island and the art – oh the art! and you can view more photos here!
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