Berlin, Germany

We got up relatively early this morning and headed into town. We left Sarsha on the outskirts and caught a bus into the centre. We got off at the city zoo and from there is was about a 5km walk to the Berlin wall. Along the way we passed all the famous monuments, the Siegessäule, the Brandenburg Gate and then check point charlie. It was interesting reading all the information at checkpoint charlie. There is still the original us checkpoint in the middle of the road. This area was the only allied crossing and at the peek of the fighting it was the soviets pointing their tanks at the allied forces and vice versa. It is scary to think the wall only came down in 1989...I was 7 but don’t remember anything. What is even scarier is that 3 people were killed in 1989 for trying to escape across the border...so the hatred and killing continued up to the very end.
After wandering through the city...getting a little lost trying to follow the path of the old wall, we finally found the 1.3 kms that is left of the wall. Known as the the East Side Gallery, in 1990 artists were invited to come and paint a section of the wall to celebrate the wall coming down. We visited at a good time as the government have injected funds into doing up the site so all the artists that did the original works in 1990 have come back and repainted and fixed up their original works.
After a big day of walking we caught the train back to the centre, jumped on a bus and hit the road again bound for somewhere between Berlin and Amsterdam.