Sunday, July 14th: Today was my first FULL day in Berlin (we arrived here around 6:30 last night) and it did not disappoint! Berlin will ALWAYS have a special place in my heart because it was the first European city I had ever visited (literally one year ago today) and I have fallen in love with its liberal, open quirkiness, graffitied walls, crazy and historic architecture, and its conflicted past.
We started with a four-hour bus tour of both East and West, stopping and seeing various neighborhoods, sections of the former Wall, and seeing a former castle of Frederick the Great. We then spent two hours taking a guided tour of the Reichstag, and then did a walking tour of the Holocaust memorials to the murdered Jews, Sinti/ Roma, and homosexuals. Finally, we finished by having some awesome Turkish food in another section of the city on what used to be the East/West Berlin border.
What continues to stand out to me is how liberal and laid back Berlin is and how it has gone out of its way to acknowledge the Holocaust. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews takes up a huge section of the city and has a maze of blocks of varying heights and unlevel ground. There is also a museum under the Memorial that I have yet to visit, and my views on it are very mixed. I am just not sure if that is the way to remember six million innocent victims but at least it makes a point of permanently remembering them.
Remnants of the Cold War are also everywhere and it is really cool to see how this city continues to reunify.
We leave Berlin tomorrow to spend two nights in Boitzenburg and then come back here for three more nights on Wednesday.
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