BERLIN – Germany (Tues 04 Aug)

Today we are going for a walking tour, one of the free ones, we like those. But first we had a complimentary hotel breakfast. This was entertainment in itself. It was like ‘trough night’ had started at 9:00am. People scrambling over the top of each other to get at the food.

From here we made our way via tram to the Starbucks beside the Brandenburg Gate. This tour is so popular there must have been a couple of hundred people lining up, and they were breaking us up into groups of about 40 with a guide. We got Dave, an English lad who is a self professed nerd when it came to German history. As a guide he was fantastic. He was so passionate and enthusiastic about his subject that he had us eating out of the palm of his hand. As far a walking tours go, I would recommend this one. We heard more history than I can remember and visited and looked at things that we wouldn’t have found, and if we had we would not have appreciated the significance of. As Dave said he was going to “take you quickly through 800 years of German history”, he did, and he told us some very entertaining, interesting and significant stories.

He explained the significance of the embassies around the square. We saw the hotel of Michael Jackson’s baby dangling fame. We visited Jewish Holocaust Memorial, Hitler’s bunker (now a carpark), the site of the infamous Book Burning, the remains of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, through the fabulous 20s, and back almost to where we started. It was here that Dave treated us to the story of how the Berlin Wall came down, due mainly to a ‘monumental cock up’ on the part of a certain ministerial man (it makes you wonder what became of him) who failed to become informed before entering a press conference. However getting back to Dave’s speech, it would have to be one of the most passionate 20 minute presentations that I have seen for a long time. This guy really is history geek and it is contagious, he had us eating out of his hand and passers by sitting down to enjoy the story. A fantastic end to a brilliant tour.

We followed up the tour by spending quite a bit of time around Check Point Charlie, and going through the museum. This not only documents the various escape attempts by the Easterners to get out, but also went through the various uprisings in other Socialist countries that cumulated in the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of Socialism. It was incredible to be in the place where so many people had risked their very lives for a life of freedom, the spot where the Soviet and American tanks had their stand off, the spot where many people believed World War III would start. Fortunately it didn’t, but you do get a real sense of the tension that was there. What was surprising for us was seeing one of the few remaining parts of the Berlin Wall, just a few hundred meters from here. It was much smaller than we had imagined. It was about 2.5 to 3 meters tall, and probably not helped by the fact that it has been chipped away by souvenir hunters creating holes in it. It is rather amusing that there is now a fence around the Berlin wall to protect it.

Within the museum exhibits displaying the various uprisings it was particularly relevant for us and an added context that we haven’t experienced before, to see photos of places that we have been to recently that were involved in these events. Photos of Wenceslus square in Prague packed to the gunnels with protesters, Hungary also displayed, the hole cut in the fence by Austria. These are events that have happened within our lifetimes. We will never think of these events in the detached way that we have before, this was real, and this was where it happened.