BERLIN :)

Today we went into Berlin for the first time. We had to catch the train from Werder into Berlin which took about 20 minutes. The train is so much faster. When we got to Berlin we went straight to the Brandenburg Gate and took a lot of photos under it. Then we met up with our tour guide who was from England. He took us around all the main places in Berlin and explained the history of the city. We saw that Memorial to the Holocaust which was built in 2005, and then to the place where Hitler killed himself. It was a car park because the German people have decided to memorialize the victims of war rather than the perpetrators. We went to what was left of the Berlin wall and to Checkpoint Charlie, both of those places were very interesting.

The churches in Berlin are very pretty and so old... :) Much better than in New Zealand. We went to site of the burning of the books which was so cool. The memorial is so powerful, it is glass in the ground, and underneath is empty bookshelves. It was right next to the University where Einstein studied. There was a massive teachers strike going on while we were there, which was pretty cool. The teachers in New Zealand should strike like the Germans. :) The tour took a couple of hours and was a lot of walking, but Berlin is not actually that big, I thought it would be bigger. When the tour had finished we went to the Reichstag (German Parliament Building). We had another tour guide here to take us through. It was cool because there was all this graffiti on the wall in Russian that was from 1945 when the Russian soldiers arrived thinking that it was Hitler's headquarters. It was cool to see that they had kept it even though we didn't understand what it said. We then went into the viewing chamber in the parliament building. All the seats were this purple colour which was cool. We then went to the viewing platform of the dome which had an amazing view of Berlin. You could see the Brandenburg gate and the Cathedral and everything from there. Then we got back on the train and went home to Werder. Everyone was tired at this point from all the walking. We all just wanted to sleep. So ah, yeah. That was our day :)
-Anna