Berlin – Day 3

We typed the church building address into our GPS and drove there instead of taking the city transportation.  It was a German speaking ward, of course, but we were greeted by lots of people in English.   They handed us headsets for English translation and a man sat in the back of the choir seats and quietly translated the meeting for us into English.  I was so grateful.   We are having wonderful experiences visiting wards in different cities and countries.  A few differences… more similarities.   This ward, being a downtown Berlin ward, had only 4 other kids that we could see.  We practically tripled their primary numbers  by bringing 11 kids with us. 

 

After church we drove home, changed, ate lunch and got ready for our Sunday afternoon walk.  We used our Berlin weekend bus pass to get down to the Tiergarten train station.  From the top of the train station platform we could tell there was something going on.  Roads had been blocked off and they were using the main sections of road around the Victory Column as a track for inline speed skating.

We headed into the Tiergarten Park.  (Berlin’s “Central Park”) that stretches for two miles west of the Brandenburg Gate.  We walked on the pathways through the forests for awhile and then came back out to the road to check out the inline skating race.

         

The Victory Column (or “Chick on a Stick” as it’s affectionately called by the locals) sits as the centerpiece of the Tiergarten.  It was built to commemorate the Prussian defeat of Denmark in 1864… then reinterpreted after the defeat of France in 1870.   It originally stood at the Reichstag but was moved to this location in 1938 and given a 25 foot lengthening by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, in anticipation of the planned re-envisioning of Berlin as “Germania” the capital of a world-wide Nazi empire. 

     

The climb up to the top was hardly worth the view.  It was a humid day, and the stairs were tight and filled with stinky tourists.  We took a quick peak of Berlin’s Tiergarden and downtown area and were on our way.   The Reichstag is on the left, the green roof of the Berlin Cathedral in the middle, the tiny Brandenburg gate at the end of the street. 

   

We wandered through more of the Tiergarten on our way out, finding a large German playground for the kids to play on while we sat and relaxed.  Then we walked the rest of the way to the Brandenburg Gate for another picture. 

Back at home we ended the night watching one of our favorite church movies… ‘One Good Man’.