Berlin Walking Tour

Today Mark decided to stay in and play some poker. So I went off to the walking tours to get a condensed history lesson about this city. I took the S-Bahn to Brandenburg Gate the ride itself took about 35minutes. In front of the Starbucks is where all the Sandeman's Tours meets. Berlin has more specific tours. The free walking tour is a general tour of the city.



We started out walking by most of the monuments in the area. We walked through the holocaust memorial. It is really quiet and gives you a lonely feeling walking through it. People enter and disappear from sight in the distance. The columns all differ in height and it reminds me of Giant's Causeway.







Everywhere you look there is construction going on. It seems that Germany is still rebuilding and fixing much of their architecture. There are still bullet holes and weapons damage on a lot of the buildings that we walk pass. One of the most interesting walls was tagged with lots of graffiti and near the bottom there was writing that said "David Hasselhoff Saved The World From Communism". The last three words has since been disappeared but the first message still remains.







There are still pieces of the Berlin wall that is still in tact. There are two sets of walls. The middle area was known as the dead zone where anyone seen in that area would be shot on site. Today there wall serves as a reminder. Today there was a picture memorial along this area where photography from the war is being displayed. Parts of the wall have been made into art as well.











Book burning was prevalent during the Nazi regime. Bebelplatz Square is where most of these book burning occurred. There is a memorial on the bottom of the square to serve as a reminder as well as a quote from Heinrich Heine, one of the authors whose book was censored. The quote reads "Those that burn books will burn people". Furthermore the university across the street has a book sale on sunny days of the books that were once censored and burned in that very square.





Checkpoint Charlie is a popular tourist attraction now. None of what you see there is original. The reason this point is famous is because there was a standoff of tanks between the east and west forces. There is a picture of an American guard facing one direction and another picture of a soviet guard facing the other. The soldier's name is not Charlie, Charlie is the military designation for that particular checkpoint.