Monday, July 27, 2009

Family visit, part two!

First stop of the morning: Breakfast in the neighborhood with the highest café density in Berlin... Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz... We ate at Café Anna BlumeBeautiful blooming breakfast: German bread and rolls with a stack of different meats, cheeses, fruit, spreads....mmmm...
Next stop: Bernauer Straße. When the wall went up, this street was divided in two. Neighbors across the street suddenly were unreachable, dividing the neighborhood into East and West. Today there is a documentation center with a lookout platform, and they reconstructed one part of what the "death strip" used to look like along the border to the East, the series of barricades they had to keep out people trying to flee (land mines, dogs, barbed wire, silent alarm signals, automatically-firing weapons).
If you look down you can see where the death strip was: still no houses there today.

Then we walked to Ku'damm, visited the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and then walked along the Zoo, through the Tiergarten to the Siegessäule.
Memorial to the Soviet soldiers who died liberating the city of Berlin.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Checkpoint Charlie
Audrey gets a hankering for some afternoon sweets... :)
Rotes Rathaus, "Sei Berlin!"

Walk along the East Side Gallery...
Oberbaumbrücke, a bridge which was closed to normal traffic during the Cold War because it connected East and West, Americans and Soviets exchanged spies here.
Sunset on the Spree

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for "taking us with you" on your tour, Kathryn!

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