Berlin

Day 1: Well here we are ready to go on our first European Holiday, heading to Germany for a week…. The first day was spent on travelling. We caught the tube to Heathrow to catch the flight to Munich at 9.30am, then caught the Munich S-Bahn (their train system) to the Central station, then onto the German Rail on a really nice and comfortable train for a 5 hour trip to Berlin. The weather was really good and the views from the train were lovely! After a few games of cards, reading and staring out the window we were in Berlin. We decided to catch a taxi to our hotel and that is when we realised that we were actually in another country…taxi driver couldn’t speak English and driving on the wrong side of the road (I kept thinking we were going to crash!). Our hotel was really wicked, thanks to Matty’s work we got really great rates! We spent that night in our room after having a small walk around our hotel at 10pm looking for a bottle of wine to celebrate.

Day 2: We woke up to rain and clouds. Not cool! But we weren’t ganna let that get us down. We had breakfast and went for a wonder around Berlin city. Our hotel was just off the Kurfűrstedamm (K’damm to the locals)– a famous strolling and shopping venue of the western city. So we wondered up this road to the Zoologischer Garten area and we spotted our first awesome building, the ruins of the memorial church named the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis-Kirche. This church was built in 1895 and was then severely damaged by the bombings in 1943. Instead of fully refurbishing the church, they have left it as it was for a silent reminder of the horrors of the war. We carried on walking through a huge park called the Tiergarten. It is a massive garden park (494 acres) and we found a cool little secret garden in the middle of it. By this stage we had probably walked about 5km but we kept going and found the Brandenburger Tor – This Gate is Berlin’s most famous sight, were many powerful people have marched through. It also was just on the border of East and West Berlin on the East side when the Berlin Wall went up in the 60’s.
We kept walking down the Unter den Linden to go to the Famous Pergamon Museum. Now this was pretty cool!!… We put on our Audio guides and did the tour through the museum seeing parts of the original Pergamon Alter that dates back to 160BC; the Market Gates of Miletus, over 16m high; the original Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way into Babylon; the Temple of Athena and a lot more!
From here we went started to make our way back home and came across the Holocaust-Denkmal, a new memorial officially called the “Memorial to the killed Jews of Europe” completed in 2005 it comprises of a random number (about 1000) dark grey concrete blocks of varying heights up to 2m high covering a huge square field. People can walk in between them all and you can certainly loose each other, isn’t that right Matt! :)
Then back on the U-Bahn, back to the hotel, or so we thought….Yes I got us a little lost, it does get tricky when all the names are these long German names and all look the same. But it worked out well as we came out to find lots of restaurants around us, so we decided to stay here for dinner. We found one that had English in the menu and looked good. As it was, our waiter spoke English really well and we ended up choosing off a true German Menu, designed for the weeks of the Oktoberfest. The waiter had to explain everything to us, as we had no idea. Matty got a big bone of tender pork with sauerkraut and potatoes, and I got the same with German styled chicken. Man they were good, huge, yummy meals and we slept well on full tummies after a long but great day.

Day 3: After a good sleep we woke up early again to have breakie and get to the walking tour that kicked off at 10am from Zoo-Garten. Our guide was an Aussie named Kurk, which was cool because he told things as they were and we could also understand him. Apparently Berlin is cheap-as to live, with the average person paying 200-290Euros a month for a good flat. Now that is cheap! Reason being because Berlin has a decreasing population due to 20-30% unemployment (the government says its only about 15%, but they would). Crazy, because it really would be an awesome place to live.
Anyway…We stated the tour at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church, then onto the S-Bahn to East Berlin at museum island, and the Berlin Cathedral which looks Catholic but is actually protestant, built in early 1900’s and recently refurbished. Only one bomb hit it in the war, but it was hit by lots of bullets from the Russians after the war. We moved onto seeing where a famous palace is being rebuilt and a few more sights, along the way learning all about WWII and the Cold War. We followed onto seeing the Berlin Wall and Check Point Charlie, and hearing about some funny attempts of people trying to get themselves and their families into West Berlin. We saw were Hitler’s bunker used to be and where he committed suicide; it is now a car park surrounded by new buildings. Of course there is no memorial for him as this could cause some major problems. Then onto the old Nazi HQ (now the tax office), the Jewish memorial and the Brandenburg Gates. We ended the tour at the Reichstag – the famous parliament building. What an awesome day!! We both really enjoyed the 4 hour tour and would highly recommend it to anyone.
For the afternoon we wondered around a bit more, going past a huge Chocolate shop (mmm German choc is good!) and enjoyed the weather. We chilled out that evening making dinner in our room and just relaxing knowing we still had a few more early mornings and busy days ahead of us.

Berlin was cool, we will definitely try and go back as there is still so much that we did not see.

Sorry for this being such a long post, but there was just so much to tell you.
Hope this finds you all well.

Love K & M
x o x o x o x o
The Kaiser-Wilhlem church. Only the front tower of the original church is still standing
You can see how damaged the church was from the war
Inside the Pergamon museum, see the Alter's frieze along the wall The Goddess Athena in the Pergamon Alter frieze, built from 160 BC. They used to be in colour but they are so old now the colour has gone
The original Ishtar Gate and...
the Processional Way (180m long) into Babylon – Built in the 6th century BC, during the reign of Nebuchadnezer II
The Berlin Cathedral and a cool fountain
The Holocaust Memorial. See what i mean about how easy you can loose people in there!
The Brandenburg Tor

Chocolate version of the Reichstag... NO don't eat it Matty!
The actual Reichstag. This is were we ended our tour
AMPLE MAN!! The red and Green men on traffic lights are these funky guys. If you saw them you knew you were in East Berlin, but now they are stating to take over all of Berlin