Mon, 25 Aug 2003

author Tim	location Meißen, Sachsen, Deutschland
posted 10:16 CEST 28/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Deutschland/Deutschland 2 ( all photos )

Berlin on Foot ( 15 photos )
First task this morning was to organise some hot water for a coffee (still no gas). I amused myself and a helpful woman running the caravan park's café by asking in German whether I could have some hot water. She helfully provided a thermos full, and we enjoyed the change of our own brewed hot drinks.
Back into town via bus 620 to Wansee then fast-train RE1 to Friedrichstraße (we were getting the hang of this by now), we wandered down Wilhelmstraße to the Czech embassy. I'm not sure what John Howard or his predecessors have said to the Czech people, but Australians are amongst the few remaining people who need a visa to enter the country. The embassy was open five days a week (better than most), however only from 8:30-11am - we had arrived too late.
So, from there we set about finding a late breakfast / early lunch - and the tour guide's suggestion that the huge, visible from everywhere TV tower (Fernsehturm) was cheaper than you might think was sounding good.
After walking along there along Unter den Linden, standing in the queue for a while, taking a reasonably fast lift up to the top and then standing in another queue for a table at the restaurant, we were there!
The tower itself has an interesting history - concieved by the Soviets as a display of their engineering talent, they infact had to sub-contract to the Swedes about half-way through when it was clear that they didn't know how to build the rest. Knowing that were were in safe Swedish hands, we enjoyed the fantastic views from the restaurant all over the city, rotating twice an hour which is much faster than in Centerpoint / AMP tower in Sydney.
Back down on the ground, there was a couple of museums we wanted to look at we had passed at speed on bikes the day before - firstly the Mauermuseum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, back at Allied Checkpoint Charlie. This museum was first started just a couple of years after the wall went up, and has been in a constant state of change ever since. It documents the terrible history surrounding the wall, escape stories (home-built submarines, tunnels, hot air balloons, smuggling people in cars) and the ever more deadly technology to stop said escapes. We spent a few hours slowly wandering around taking it all in - a truly great place to do so.
Our next stop was a little way away, back into the former Soviet sector then along the wall's previous path (the bottom bricks of the wall have been left in the tarmac, showing the path it used to follow). A few sections still remain, amongst them a part housing the Topography of Terror exhibition in the former Gestapo Headquarters.
This was quite a chilling place to be, complete with audio-guide explanations of the otherwise German-only descriptions of orders surrounding the holocaust, all inside the place most of them were ordered from. Pictures completed the explanation.
It was quite interesting to see just how the entire population was swayed with propoganda, and that the hatred often directed at the German people in general for past wrongs really only stems back to a few nasty people, far from the entire 80 or so million living here today. Those who stood up against it (and there were plenty of them discussed here) were all sent to pretty much the same fate - one of the many concentration camps.
By now it was dinner time, and some random wandering landed us at a Chinese Bistro off Friedrichstraße. The menu was quite difficult to navigate, so in the end we resorted to "pick a number between 40 and 80", and ordered the dish with that number. The worst that resulted was that Liz's choice had some seaweed (we think), but otherwise it was all quite good and cheaper than expected.
Waiting for our train, we went back to a bar for a coffee, but eventually caught another fast train home with no problems.

(customised)