One day I was talking to Seth's teacher and learned she was from Berlin. I asked her if she would be our tour guide if we visited the city sometime this year. She quickly agreed and we began to make plans. Brooke and Seth are on Holiday from October 3-October 21so this was a great time to plan an overnight trip. We met her at 9 a.m. And left her around 4:30 p.m. for the 3 1/2 hour train ride back to Göttingen. We were able to see so many things easily with her as our guide walking and quickly jumping on and off the subway or city bus. The kids were troopers with no complaining of walking for 8 hours and carrying our backpacks with everything from our overnight stay. You might say we have mastered packing light.
This is what we would call the mayor's office.
A typical Berlin restaurant. We settled for a brat from a street vendor at lunch time. The curry wurst was made famous in Berlin.
Most of the streets in Berlin are wide and noisy but this street was an exception so Frau Schröder (Seth's teacher) wanted us to see this one.
Across the water behind us is Museum Island. You could see where there had been gunshots on the building from the war.
This is the Berlin Dome. It is a church.
We all thought it was so funny that the door handle to the Berlin Dome is about as tall as Joshua.
This is a store that sells "walking man" products. This wall shows the different crosswalk symbols in the world.
Then to the subway to see Checkpoint Charley.
I was expecting Checkpoint Charley to be something much bigger. This was so very interesting to me. We even decided to go to the Checkpoint Charley Museum. We could have spent hours in there and I am not a fan of museums. Some of the things we saw were how people were able to cross over between east and west and not get caught. They hid people in VW bugs in ways that never should have worked. I think because this happened not so long ago it was very surreal and serious. I remember as a little girl being scared of Russia and now seeing so many things that I have only heard of and didn't understand when I was learning them in school. I told the kids how history is happening right now while they are children and they don't even realize it. We also talked about praying for wisdom that we don't repeat the same mistakes that were done in the past. Our time in Germany has been invaluable for talking about so many things and the kids (and us) learning things that are difficult to teach.
The Berlin wall was not all what I expected. I thought it was much thicker, but instead it was long with soldiers carrying guns so it didn't have to be so thick. In the beginning in some spots it was nothing more than some barbed wire laying on the ground.
This is a picture of a picture showing a "wall woodpecker" when the wall came down.
To the right behind Joshua is a section of the wall.
Another section-there are not many sections of this size left in the city.
A common car from the past. You could rent them as a tourist attraction.
This is the building where the German government meets. It has a glass dome on the top. The wait was 3 hours to go in the dome....we would have missed our train :(
This writing is referring to the German government building above.
I must admit I was glad to see this. You realize how thankful you are for your country.
The only Holocaust thing we visited was this monument which was a bunch of cement blocks of varying heights-fun for jumping until they asked us not to-oops!
One of the last things we did was go in the Berlin Victory Column that had LOTS of stairs.
The stairs were worth it to see this beautiful view of the city.
Signs of Fall in Berlin.
One last picture.
Time to head inside to catch our train.
The train ride home. At first we couldn't find a seat and we were standing. I thought it might be a long 3 1/2 hour ride home. Then we found this nice cabin that wasn't occupied.
One tired little boy....almost to our bus stop. Joshua was holding onto him so he didn't fall out of his seat.
I heard the kids playing today and they were going to take the train and then the bus....different means of transportation after living here. They throw in their German words they know with their English too.
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