Day 22 - July 18: Berlin Center

Interior inspired by fish

This morning we sent Julia out to bring us the same delicious treats we had yesterday morning from the bakery around the corner before setting out to finish the audio tour of the city we had started yesterday.  We made our way back to the Pariser Pratz near Brandenburg Gate and looked into some of the buildings that had been pointed out on our tour but weren’t open on Sunday evening.  The buildings on the square are designed plainly as to not draw attention away from the Gate, which left architect Frank Gehry (of Prague’s Dancing House and Disney Concert Hall fame) to move his creativity to the interior of the DZ Bank building.   

Catching back up with the tour, we walked down Unter den Linden street, the Champs-Elysees of Berlin in the 1800s connecting the Royal Palace with the king’s hunting grounds.  After WWII, this was the main street in East Berlin.  Unfortunately for us there is a big construction project happening in town so the entire middle part of the street is torn up.  When we got to the statue of Frederick the Great, we stopped by the Bebelplatz – the square of books.  Humbodlt Univeristy (where Marx, Engels, and the Brothers Gimm all studied and Einstein taught) borders the square.  In the center of the square is a glass window that you can look down into a room of empty bookshelves, a reminder that this is the site that Hilter had thousands of newly banned books burned, ending the era of “extreme Jewish intellectualism.” 

The next building down Unter den Linden is one that looks like a Greek Temple from the outside called the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) built as barracks for the bodyguards of the Crown Prince in the early 1800s.  Over the years it has been transformed into a memorial for fallen soldiers and has been used as such by Nazis, communist authorities, and by the German government after 1989.  Stepping inside, it is one of the most powerful memorials we’ve seen.  A simple statue Mother with Her Dead Son sits in the middle of an otherwise empty, silent space.  There is hole above her so just the statue is open to the elements.  It must be even more powerful to see on a day when it is snowing or raining, or even super sunny.  Tied for favorite memorial with Budapest’s Memorial to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Pei Annex

The building just across the street houses the German Museum, a stop along the tour we wanted to make.  We were badly needing lunch (just those pastries earlier this morning) so decided to see what the museum café had to offer.  They were just serving cakes today, but rather than waste time looking for lunch we decided some cake and pretzels would get us through.  The German History Museum is basically a history of the world spanning from 1 BC to the present…up through 1918 is on one floor and the last century is on another.  It would be a great place to take an AP history class dedicating at least a week to each epoch, but we didn’t have that kind of time.  We did our best on the permanent exhibits and went to see the special collections in the building designed by Pei, the architect who made the glass pyramid at the Louvre.  By the end Rachel and I were wondering why we were so unbelievably tired…could it have anything to do with the fact that we have been subsisting only on bread and sugar??  

Berlin Cathedral

We continued on the tour (keeping an eye out for some protein).  We walked over the bridge to Museum Island, pausing to look at the pretty buildings, and over the Spree River.  On the other side we were then at the DDR museum (which we visited already) above which there are lots of food stands.  We tried for something vegetarian and ended up with French fries and a caprese panini, which we ate on the other side of the street with statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  The tour took us by the TV tower into Alexanderplatz.  It took us a long time to complete, but the audio portion of our tour was finished. It was fun listening to the music and information as we walked.

Now on our own to decide the next stop, we were quick to choose the Ritter Sport chocolate shop.  The girls were in heaven.  Besides being a small museum dedicated to their craft and a place to buy any variety sold more cheaply than at other stores, they have two special features:  a place where you can design your own concoction adding any of their mixins to either white or milk chocolate and come back to pick up your completed chocolate, and a place where you can mix any of their bars into ice cream.  You can only do these special things until 6 pm and we were too late for them.  But, we made this stop early in the week knowing it wouldn’t be our last time in.  Rachel will especially need the extra time to consider all of her options carefully.

We’d been told to be sure to go to the Kruezburg section of

Berlin– a grittier, grafittied part of town – the largest Turkish city outside of Turkey.  We found Café V, a highly reviewed vegetarian restaurant in the neighborhood, so we headed there and had some delicious chickpea polenta with spinach, tofu and spinach cannelloni, and an arugula salad.  Protein! Vegetables!  I was so happily sated at the end of that meal!   We came back to our apartment to watch a movie.  It was way too late for the three-hour Schindler’s List so we decided to watch (and really liked) the Katie Clark recommended Lives of Others (German with subtitles) about a Stasi officer in East Berlin while sampling our Ritter Sport bars.