Berlin! Journée 2...

Let's be honest, one of the most magical things about Berlin was the abundance of Starbucks. Really, of almost all of the American food we California kids missed so much in Bordeaux. Starbucks, frozen yogurt, boba, Mexican food...  Anyways, I'm getting off track. But obviously the first thing I did was hop on over to a Starbucks and pick up an iced caramel macchiato to jump start my day.¹

And yet... an ulterior motive lurks beneath the surface. That's right... the real reason I was at Starbucks... was to take the free walking tour of Berlin! Duh, duh, duh! Oh, gracious! Ha, so this company offers free Berlin walking tours that cover all the big spots in Berlin. It's not totally free because you're supposed to tip your tour guide at the end (that's how they get paid), but it's still a good deal. The tour guide for my group was really informative and told some good France jokes (ha!). And it was a great way to see an overview of all the major sites and think about what I wanted to go back to later.

We passed about a dozen of these group beer bike things. Mostly very noisy,
very drunk bachelor and bachelorette parties haha. Good thing a guide does the steering.

We started at Pariserplatz, where the Brandenburg Gate and the French and U.S. embassies are. While the Berlin Wall was up, the square was part of the death zone, but now there's a Starbucks there. Go figure!

Next, we walked to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is a big square filled with rectangular concrete slabs that get taller and taller toward the center. As you walk through them, the ground also slopes up and down, so in the middle, they are way above your head. It's supposed to be disorienting. Walking through it is very eerie. There's also an information center underground, below the square, which I went back to later.

Later, we saw the site of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide. It's just a parking lot with nothing marking the spot because they don't want crazy extremists to make memorials or anything.

We also saw some old Nazi buildings. They used weird proportions to make the buildings seem very imposing and bigger than they actually are, and to make people look small when they go up to them. Like the windows on the top floors are smaller, and the doors are really big, with door knobs that are like chest-level.

Remnants of the Berlin Wall

Next, we walked by one of the remaining sections of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, which is actually just a reproduction. The tour guide emphasized strongly that Checkpoint Charlie and the associated museums were a huge tourist trap and a waste of time and money, which is what I'd read online.

Fake Checkpoint Charlie

We also saw the Gendarmenmarkt square, which has a theater and two almost identical cathedrals. According to a mixture of Wikipedia and what I remember the tour guide saying, French Huguenots,² who had fled to Berlin, built the first cathedral, and everyone was very impressed. But the Germans didn't want the French looking all cool on their territory, so they built a practically identical cathedral across the square. (Oooh, they showed them!) Actually, the cathedrals standing today have mostly been rebuilt since they were destroyed in World War II. That's one of the interesting things about Berlin; a lot of the buildings you see that look very old and historic, are actually meticulous recreations that were built after the originals were destroyed in World War II. 

The theater and one of the cathedrals. The other one looks just like it.

After, we walked to Bebelplatz³, where we saw the memorial for the books burned by the Nazis. You look down through a window in the ground, into a small room filled with empty book shelves. We also saw the Neue Wache building, which has the sculpture Mother with her Dead Son inside, as a monument to civilian victims of World War II. It was very solemn and sad.

Next, we passed Berliner Dom and the TV Tower, which I had seen the day before. We also stopped by Museum Island, which has five really famous museums, and we saw the building where Angela Merkel lives, which is across from one of the museums.⁴ 

Angela Merkel's appartment
building :O

So that was the speed tour of Berlin! I think it was almost four hours of walking, and I was pretty exhausted.  The tour gave me a good idea of what places I really wanted to make sure I got back to. It also made me realize just how present World War II and the Cold War are Berlin. Everywhere you look, there are signs of what happened - memorials, reconstructed buildings, structures left over from the Nazi and Communist governments. Even where the wall is no longer standing, there is a line of brick pavers down the middle of the street, marking where it once was.  As the tour guide said, even though Berlin is such a vibrant, modern, and influential city now, they have certainly made sure that no one will forget what happened in the past.

The Pergamon Museum, part of Museum Island

Anyways, this post is a little long, so I'll cover the rest of what I did this day in my next one. À bientôt!

1. It was also hellaaaaaaaa hot out. Trust me, the iced beverage was a necessity.
2. French Protestants who were persecuted in France in the 1600's and the beginning of the 1700's.
3. "Platz" means like place or square, btw.
4. I never realized her first name was pronounced with a hard "g" before. :O