Around Berlin on No Sleep!

We met and headed out on foot to explore Berlin with our guides. Our hotel is located so nicely that we could walk to all kinds of important places very easily. It was also good to walk because going to bed is what most of us want to do! We saw lots of important city landmarks like the Neptune Fountain and the last communist statue left in Berlin--In the photo below I am sitting with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two developers/leaders of socialism/communism.

We visited the oldest protestant (Lutheran) church in Berlin as well, and that is shown below. Notice the bicycle event that is streaming by…we weren’t sure what it was about.

We walked to the famous Brandenburg Gate that used to separate East and West Germany. This area was the site of the famous President Reagan speech, “Tear down this wall!” (In this picture we were actually on the East German side of the gate—Reagan spoke from the other side.) We also had lunch at a very nice restaurant right beside the gate.

We then headed to the memorial for the Jewish Holocaust victims, and we crossed what used to be the site of the Berlin Wall. It is now mostly a paved brick line that still runs through the city (see below). After WWII, Berlin was separated with the West side of the city being free, and the right side of the city being communist. This tragedy continued on until the wall finally came down in 1989, and the country was unified in 1990. It’s hard to believe that this was once the dividing line for the cold war. Berlin has come a very long way in just 18 years.

Next we came to the Reichstag (pictured below). This is one of the main government buildings in Germany, hosting its Bundestag. The Bundestag is like the legislative branch of our federal government. We got to tour the inside of the building, including the amazing room in which the Bundestag meets (2nd picture below), and the glass dome on top that both serves as a beautiful top, but also as a light and ventilation source for the building. Students: try Googling "Reichstag" to read about a very long and rich history of the several buildings that have been called the Reichstag in Germany. This was an amazing building to visit.

A rain storm broke out just as we were leaving the Reichstag, so we were lucky we weren’t going to do any more walking. We ran to our bus and had a slightseeing trip around Berlin on the bus, including several sites that I hope to visit on my own later on. We even saw some still-standing sections of the Berlin Wall. So, now at the end of my 29 hour day, I am going to go to bed early here to get over any jetlag that I might be having right now.