City Tour with Matt, Currywurst, and Indian food.

 We had a lot of choices for breakfast.  We had gone down to eat around 7 am.  I will have to remember to take some pictures of the breakfast tomorrow.  We were meeting for the tour promptly at 8:30 am.  We were all there.  We checked our audio system and then headed to the tram.  It was very crowded since it was a Monday morning.  Most of us could not validate our tickets on that tram.  We validated before getting on the S-Bahn. When we got off of the S-Bahn we met up with Matt Robinson. He was our local guide for the morning. We did a historical Berlin Walk concentrating on WWII and the Cold War.  We would be seeing the Brandenburg Gate, Holocaust Memorial, Hitler's Bunker, Topography of Terror, Checkpoint Charlie, Bebelplatz, Humboldt University, and Museum Island.  

Matt and Jana

Matt gave us an overview of things that we might be seeing. He was fabulous.  He was interesting as well as funny.  The subject matter was more depressing, since we talked a lot about the WW2 and the Holocaust. Berlin has done a lot to memorialize the victims and has tried to not glorify the perpetrators.  There are reminders everywhere.

Brandenburg Gate.  We listened to Reagan's speech "Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .

    General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.
    Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!
    Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

—Ronald Reagan, address at the Brandenburg Gate, June 12, 1987"  It was ery moving.

Berlin Marathon is supposed to be the best in the world.

All different heights of blocks.  The Holocaust memorial - one of the surprising things is that there is no graffiti on any of these blocks.  Apparently the company that made the gas that killed people also made a paint that is resistant to graffiti.  The graffiti just washes off.

The trees are all numbered.  I guess they were numbered because someone could.  A high percentage of the local trees are Linden trees.

This shows where the wall was.

In front of homes or some stores these plaques can be found in the sidewalks.  They show where Jewish families lived who had been killed.  They are called stumbling stones.

These bears appear all over the city.  Each is a little different.  I think it is like the painted cows, horses or pianos that we have seen in other cities. 

We made a stop at the Mall of Berlin for refreshments, banking, or restrooms.  It was only for 15 minutes.  Some of us had a chance to sit down briefly.  It was 1€ to get into the restroom.  In the stall they had a s seat sanitizer.  I have not ever seen anything like this.  I pushed a button which I thought would flush but a gadget came out from in back and the seat itself began to rotate while the gadget wiped on the sanitizer.  Once the seat had done a complete circle, it stopped and the gadget returned to its home position.  Then  saw the button to flush.

Reminders of WWII everywhere, even in the mall.

Part of the wall left standing as a memorial.

Another bear with the currywurst

Trabi was the car of the masses and apparently it was also an edible car which I do not understand at all.  It was made out of some plant material. The cars didn't last long.  Apparently the pigs liked them. Wikipedia says that this is an urban legend.

HOHO (Hop On, Hop Off) tour bus

Checkpoint Charlie 

The Ampelmann symbol on the traffic signals for walk and don't walk were started in East Berlin in 1961. The first traffic signal was actually in Cleveland, OH in 1914.  When the wall went down they were going to get rid of them and use something else but there was a lot of resistance to that.  Everyone liked the Ampelmann, so now they are increasing in popularity. Very iconic.

Royal chocolatier 

The pink pipes are the pipes that pump water from under the city to the river.  Berlin means city that was built on a swamp. 

Library

This picture does't show very well but it is a memorial to all the books lost from the library with the book burning.  Those are showing the empty shelves in the library. It is in the ground in front of the library.

Grieving mother is a memorial of all the mothers who suffered losses by Kathe Kollwitz. When it rains it looks like she is weeping.

Model of museum island.  5 museums in the island in the middle of the Spree River.

This big bowl is the 8th wonder of the world.  Unfortunately, is it broken because it was dropped when they were trying to move it. It is carved out of one large piece of granite. 

This is where Matt left us.  The group split up.  Some people stayed in the area.  We followed Jana to go back to the Hackescher Markt.  We were going to stop and get something to eat and to try to find a place to sit down. Jana left us.  Cassandra and Ann joined us.  We went to Curry 61 for the currywurst.  

I ordered the Berliner Currywurst (sausage) with fries.  It was pretty good but I did not realize that they would be putting so much mayo on it as well as the ketchup which was a combination of curry, Worcestershire sauce, and tomato sauce. It is a traditional German fast food.

We went across the street for some ice cream.  I had the banana brownie peanut chunk.  It was not very good.  I had the smallest sized one and ended out throwing most of it away.

We walked to our tram stop and headed back to the hotel for a much needed rest break or MDT (meter down time).  

Around 6 pm we met to go to dinner.  We decided to just walk to a restaurant close to us the Aapka Indischel (Indian).  

Zion Church in the background.

We ordered cocktails and an order of samosas for appetizer.

Very yummy. We tried to be more leisurely with this meal.  When we finished our appetizers we ordered dinner.  We ordered shrimp tandoori, dahl makani, butter chicken, chapattis, rice, raita and a bottle of Sula Sauvignon blanc (Indian wine) .  We had had Sula wine on our India trip.  Wow!! It was all very good. We didn't quite finish all of the food but it was close.  

On the way back to the hotel we decided to check Soda Market to see if they had wine which we could  take back to the room.

We were in luck.

We stopped in the room to get the wine in the little fridge.  We had to take all of the mini bar things out so that our wine would fit in. Then Jeanne and I decided to go exploring a little.  We hopped on the tram close to us, the M1 and thought that we would ride it to the end and then switch trams and reverse the directions.  We got part way and the tram stopped and we had to get off.  Luckily, the return tram was right across the street.  So we hopped on that and returned to our Zion stop.  Not a huge excitement but it was still fun. At least it was not crowded like it had been in the morning.  We were packed in like sardines on our first tram ride.