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’.

Berlin – Day 2

 

After breakfast we walked down the street, grabbed the bus to the train station and took the train to the Brandenburg Gate stop. When we walked out into the street we could tell there was something big going on.  Police Departments all across Germany had gathered for a huge Police Celebration including a marathon ending right through…

the Brandenburg Gate. 

“The historic Brandenburg Gate (1791) was the grandest, and is the last survivor, of 14 gates in Berlin’s old city wall.  he gate was the symbol of Prussian Berlin… and later the symbol of a divided Berlin.  It’s crowned by a majestic four-horse chariot with the Goddess of Peace at the reins.”   Before we got here we had found out that Napoleon took this statue to the Louvre in Paris in 1806.   My kids thought that was pretty interesting since we’ve been to Paris and the Louvre.  They were definitely excited to see the gate.   “After the Prussians defeated Napoleon and got it back (1813), she was renamed the Goddess of Victory.

The gate sat unused for more than 25 years until November 9, 1989 when the wall went down.”

We’re standing in the Pariser Platz -- “Parisian Square” so named after the Prussians defeated Napoleon in 1813.  It used to be filled with important government buildings, but were all bombed to smithereens in World War II.  For decades, it was an unrecognizable, deserted no man’s land – cut off from both East and West by the Wall.  But now it’s rebuilt  and banks, hotels, and embassies that were here before the bombing have reclaimed their original places.  The winners of the World War II enjoy this prime real estate: The American, French, British, and Soviet (now Russian) embassies are all on or near this square.”

 

  One more Berlin Buddy Bear for our photo collection…

 

After walking through the Brandenburg Gate we turned right and headed up towards the…

Reichstag Building.

“The parliament building – heart of German democracy – has a short but complicated and emotional history.  It was from here that the German Republic was proclaimed in 1918.  In 1933, this symbol of democracy nearly burned down.  While the Nazis blamed a communist plot, some believe that Hitler himself (who needed what we’d call today a “new Pearl Harbor”) planned the fire, using it as a handy excuse to frame the communists and grab power.    (Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe, who supposedly set the fire and was eventually guillotined for the crime, was posthumously pardoned by the German government in 2008.

As World War II drew to a close, Stalin ordered his troops to take the Reichstag from the Nazis.  More than 1,500 German soldiers (mostly French SS troops) made their last stand here – extending World War II by two days.  On April 30, 1945, after fierce fighting on this rooftop, the Reichstag fell to the Red Army.

It was hardly used from 1933 to 1999.   In 1995 i was wrapped in scaffolding and rebuilt into the new parliamentary home of the Bundestag.  To many Germans, the proud resurrection of the Reichstag symbolizes the end of a terrible chapter in German history.”

 

The security at the Reichstag Building was quite something.  We were hoping to tour the inside, especially the glass dome at the very top but Rick Steves apparently didn’t know you needed to get tickets ahead of time so they could do a background check on each individual.   Instead we just took pictures on the outside.  I set my camera bag down to be in this family picture and just forgot to pick it back up again.  (My camera was around my neck).  Then we walked away and an HOUR later I realized I didn’t have it and knew exactly where it was.  Chris ran back – we weren’t too far away – and since it wasn’t on the ground any more asked the security guards about it.   They had been waiting for someone to return for it but they didn’t give it back without taking Chris around to the side where the German police were waiting for him.  They looked him up and down and nodded their heads, at which point the security guards handed over my suspicious black camera bag – with an expensive lens and video camera inside.  Whew… scary. 

    

The theme of any trip with 11 kids is food.  Everybody wants to eat all the time.  We brought a lot of  snacks with us so we could keep the kids entertained every 20 minutes but after the Brandenburg Gate and walking around the Reichstag we needed some real food. 

We got some meal and onion kabobs that were really good.  One of the meats was huge cubed chunks of bacon.  Lots of fat but the actual meat part was amazing.  

After lunch we headed over to see the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  -- “This holocaust memorial, consisting of 2,711 grave stone-like pillars was completed in 2005.  It is the first formal German governmental-sponsored Holocaust memorial.”   It’s an interesting labyrinth like symbolic cemetery of stone pillars in all sizes.  We enjoyed wandering through.

   

The street called Unter den Linden is the heart of former East Berlin.  In Berlin’s good old days, Unter den Linden was on of Europe’s grand boulevards.  Named centuries ago for its thousand linden trees, this was the most elegant street of Prussian Berlin before Hitler’s time, and the main drag of East Berlin after his reign.  Hitler replaced the venerable trees – many 250 years old – with Nazi flags.  Popular discontent actually drove him to replant linden trees.  Today, Unter den Linden is no longer a depressing Cold War cul-de-sac, its pre-Hitler strolling cafe ambience is returning.

Along this road we…

• stopped to take a picture of a gigantic Steiff bear – Germany’s most expensive brands of stuffed animals. 

• scootered around the Bebelplatz square right in front of the Humboldt University where we looked into the ‘room of empty bookshelves’ – a memorial to the notorious Nazi book burning in 1933…

   

• saw all kinds of interesting bike-mobiles.  This one is a bar on wheels.

• checked out the round, Catholic St. Hedwig’s Church – nicknamed the “upside-down teacup”.  It was built by the pragmatic Frederick the Great to encourage the integration of Catholic Silesians after his empire annexed their region in 1742..  When asked what the church should look like, Frederick literally took a Silesian teacup and slammed it upside-down on the table.  Like all Catholic churches in Berlin, St. Hedwig’s is not on the street, but stuck in a kind of back lot indicating inferiority to Protestant churches.

• walked over the Spree River

• got a sneak peek of the top of the Berlin Cathedral

 

• stopped to find a bathroom and have a Pringles snack break

 

• had a sucker

• stopped to watch a  Syrian protest

• went walking down a side street lined with market type shops and then took a picture of this cutie

 

Our destination on the Unter den Linden was the Berlin Cathedral.  When we finally got there we found a big spot of grass and just relaxed while the kids played tag.  Then we bought gelato from a grumpy gelato man and found another patch of grass to hang out in.

We took a bus back on the Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Train station, trained to the main train station and bused back home.  We got delicious pizza from an Italian place close to our apartment, tucked the little kids in bed, and left the big kids to babysit while Jared, Geneva, Chris and I headed back downtown for some no-kid romantic strolls in Berlin.

The Unter den Linden at night…

The Brandenburg Gate at night…

The Reichtag Building at night…