Day 8 - 19 August - Warnemunde / Berlin - day 4 of the cruise

This morning we got up early to be ready to leave as soon as we had docked.  The ship was a little late docking but we got off quite quickly and were soon heading for Berlin. 
 We were doing a private tour with just two other couples, so our transport was a Mercedes minivan.  

We made really good time into Berlin where our tour guide was waiting - a young Irish guy called Barry.  He did an excellent job - we went to quite a few places around the city and he clearly has a really detailed knowledge of Berlin and its history.  

It's a huge bonus to be with such a small group of course - even little things like stopping for a toilet break (which of course is a term we didn't use because of the delicate sensibilities of the Americans in our group - so 'restroom break').  On a normal tour you'd have 40 or 45 people on the bus and you're going to need more than 30 minutes for each toilet break, particularly since here, everyone has to struggle with finding the money to pay for the toilet.  And of course with such a small vehicle we could be dropped off in lots of places to be shown around the city rather than having to just look out the window of the bus - even on some of the good 'private' bus tours you still apparently spend a lot of time just looking out the window at the sights because the bus can't stop and/or because it would take too long to get everyone off and then on again.

We learned and saw a lot of the history of Berlin, from its early days up to the present, of course with a lot of emphasis on the time when it was separated.  The city isn't old at all by European standards anyway, and because of the war and then the need to rebuild some badly built East German buildings there aren't actually a lot of old buildings in the city - our guide said that his rough estimate is that 70% of the buildings in the city centre are less than 30 years old.

When the East and West were separated by the wall, both sides spent a lot of time and money trying to outdo the other.  This TV tower is one of the more spectacular failures of the East:

It was built in the 1960s and was intended as a showcase of how advanced the East was at the time - showing off their command of the future against the attempt  by the West to show off the old (actually not so old) building you can see beside it.  And, they did a pretty good job, except that no matter what time of the day, there is a  beautiful cross reflecting off the tiles on the globe part of their tower, which everyone of course chose to interpret as a Christian symbol.  The East Germans apparently went to quite an amount of trouble to try to stop this by changing the shape of the tiles etc, but nothing worked.

A few more pictures - nowhere near all we saw of course!

The Brandenburg Gate

The British Embassy.  The rules about design and construction of buildings in this area are quite specific - eg the buildings have to be 44 metres tall and there are all sorts of rules about the style.  But they neglected to make it illegal to build weird shapes into the middle of the building, which is what they did.

Statue of Frederick the Great in the Unter den Linden.  Lots of things in / around the Unter den Linden are being restored at the moment, plus they're also building another subway line which had a collapse here just a couple of days ago.  So, no walk down the Unter den Linden for us  :-(

Two pictures of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  It's meant to be unsettling, and it is.  There are many memorials here and they're apparently always controversial; there is always a concern of unintentionally glorifying the Nazis or their work.

Part of the Berlin wall.  The building under construction in the distance has been quite controversial - as part of the building approval process they got permission to knock down a small part of the wall and I gather that some people thought it was done in a fairly underhanded way.