After our ICE trains to Berlin, we found our hotel pretty easily (thank God for subway workers who speak English) and checked in in late afternoon. We found ourselves surprisingly awake still despite the jet lag and the long hours awake, so we went exploring.
Our hotel was a few blocks inside what would have been East Berlin only 21 years before, and about four blocks from Checkpoint Charlie itself. We walked over and the stories are right: there is precious little that remains of the Berlin Wall there. There are murals along the street that bisected the wall, and running across the street is a two-wide set of cobblestones that marked where the Wall had stood. But from a distance you wouldn't know it was ever there. We toured the Wall museum that's there and the kids had some insight into what it meant, seeing the ways people used to escape and what happened when they didn't.
That night, and through much of our time in Berlin, we had surprising difficulty getting Sarah to eat. She's usually our foodie, and so for her to become picky was not what we had expected. We eventually hit on the key: Italian food. Spaghetti, pizza...familiar things like that were OK with her.
Our full day in Berlin (Sunday, June 27) we slept in a little, then after lunch boarded one of those hop-on-hop-off city tour buses. That enabled us to see all manner of sights, and as the weather was terrific, we could sit on the open-air top deck of the bus and really see everything. We did see more of the Wall then; Berlin left a segment by the Spee River standing and it's now an outdoor mural site for local artists.
Speaking of other atrocities, David wanted to see where Hitler's final bunker was, and so we walked to find it. It turns out to be relatively unmarked; there is a placard in front of an otherwise unassuming dirt parking lot in front of an otherwise unassuming set of apartment buildings, and you have to know what you're looking for to find it. It's good, we decided, to not make a big deal of the place, especially given what atrocities were directed from there. I felt a little uneasy standing there; the power of evil had diminished in the last 65 years, but it was still in the air. Irony alert: nearby is the German memorial to the Holocaust victims.
Walking back to the hotel that night was interrupted by the squeal of vuvuzelas and the honking of thousands of horns; Germany had just defeated Argentina in the World Cup playoffs, and Berlin started going nuts with its pride for the team. The row lasted until around 10--we could still hear some horns that late! The kids got to understand how important World Cup soccer is in just about anywhere else in the world.
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