Heading North to Berlin

We arrived in Berlin on a chilly Tuesday afternoon.
The first thing to do in a new city is grab the nearest train map and study it veeeeery
closely. Getting lost is fun, but only every once in a while. . .

Each station is comprised of different colored and extra shiny bricks,
a good reminder of which stop it is.

The front door to our pension was covered in graffiti, like much of the rest of Berlin.
We rang and waited curiously to be buzzed into the strange, dark hallway.
In the end, it was perfect- our own apartment with a full kitchen.

There is a section of the Berlin Wall that is still intact.
The wall was divided up and artists from all over the world have been commissioned to
come give a personal touch and message for the world to see.

Some people stood and studied the wall for minutes at a time,
others walked by like it was just another day, just another barrier.

Under the dreariness of the clouds and sporadic showers, the colors of the wall
jumped out as if they really were alive and speaking. Here you can see both walls with the
"death strip" in between, which was once guarded against escapees from the East into the West.

The Reichstag is the original home to the German Parliament. Destruction from a fire in the 1930's left the building forgotten until it was renovated in the 60's. In the 1990's
a glass dome was added to the top that looks down over the main hall of the parliament.

Inside the dome, a spiral walkway starts at the bottom and goes round and round
all the way up to the open-sky top. It seemed to take forever to finally reach the top.

The whole structure was fascinating, from the middle mirror section that copied
our images from top to bottom, to the smooth metal handrails guiding the eye upward.

"Before" and "After" of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
What little is left of the church contains a memorial with photographs from
before the war and a restored main hall with beautifully colored tiling.

The Holocaust Memorial was designed and constructed in 2004 by Peter Eisenman.
There are 2,711 concrete boxes of different heights, one for each page of the Talmud.

More of the street art that is so common in the city.

Unter den Linden is one of the city's main drags. Any guesses as to what that might mean?
YES! Under the Lindens!
The boulevard is lined with lindens, many museums and important buildings like Humboldt University, where 20,000 books were burned shortly after Hitler took over in 1933.

One museum on the boulevard houses a statue named "mother and her dead son",
a memorial for the "victims of war and tyranny". The striking figures are placed in a windowless room with only the light from a round hole in the ceiling falling across them.

The artist of the Global Stone Project, polishing his fabulous stones in a section
of the Tiergarten park. Located in West Berlin, it was once the hunting grounds for the
city's elite. It has many trails, lovely ponds and open fields.

Trains, trains, trains looking out toward the skyscrapers of the city center.

Another memorial was IN the "death strip", and showed the true faces of some victims.

We happened to be in Berlin over the weekend of the 20th year anniversary
of the reunification of Germany. The tables were donned with yellow, red and black coverings and we sat down to wait for the crowd to arrive . . . .

Turns out that no one really attended and the vendor-lined street was pretty much empty.
It was freezing cold, so we drank a beer, ate some bratwurst and ran back to our warm pension.
Ah, well.

Happy Celebrating!