Exploring Berlin

not impressed with the muffin size

We ate breakfast at the hotel which is 
so much nicer than grabbing something 
on the run. After breakfast our first 
stop of the day was to checkout the 
Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche. This 
is a church built in 1895, it is very 
special as it was bombed by the RAF 
in world war 2. Most of the church was 
completely destroyed leaving behind 
only a severly damaged main tower. The 
cool thing is that they have left the 
church as it was after the bombing so 
it gives a great understanding of the kind of damage the war did to berlin. I 
was really amazed by the giant hole going straight through the middle of the 
tower.

Our next planned stop was going to be the Brandenburg gate, however while 
walking there we walked past the zoo. I don’t know if it has been on the news 
in Australia, but in Europe in the headlines there has been a lot of coverage 
about a small polar bear cub named Knut (k-noot).



Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church

 
Knut was rejected by his mother and 
left to die, the staff at the zoo 
couldn’t just let him die and so they
hand raised the little feller. Knut 
spent 40 something days in intensive 
care and managed to survive. The 
headlines are all bout people thinking 
he should be put down because hand 
raising a bear isn’t natural, I for 
one hate that kind of mentality. 
Anyway Knut is the cutest little 
bear and is about the same size as 
my dog phoenix atm and was well 
worth the visit. While at the zoo we 
also saw Hippos, Rhinos, Seals, 
Elephants, Giraffes, Zebras, penguins, flamingoes and pandas. This zoo is the 
best laid out zoo i have been to. 

From the zoo we again started to walk to the Brandenburg gate, we decided It 
would be nice to go through the tier garden (main park).



Knut looks like my dog Phoenix

 
Walking through the park I got a full 
sense of just how liberal germany is 
as in the center of the park everyone 
was nude just sitting around in the 
sun. At the other end of the park we 
got to the Siegessaule, a monument 
built like most of the monuments I 
have seen so far because of a victory 
over the French. From the top of this 
tower we had a perfect view of the 
surrounding area including the gate 
and the looooong road leading upto it.

After climbing down again we were both 
buggered and were very happy to see a bike taxi waitng for us at the bottom. 
He took us all the way to the gate which was about an 8 minute bike ride.

At the gate I saw for the first time the real effects of the berlin wall, the 
wall literally went straight through roads and buildings. There is as I think 
I mentioned earlier a cobbled path showing exactly where the wall was.



Siegessaule (victory column)

 
What I found really interesting is that 
the Brandenburg gate was stuck in east 
germany (by only 10m) and thus was 
under control of the russians until 
the wall fell.

Near to the gate is berlins most 
important building the Reichstag, 
built In 1894 is the current federal 
german parliament. On the top of this 
private parliament is a glass dome 
which is open to the public. The dome 
is absolutely beautiful and doesn’t 
look out of place in the old building. 
Inside the dome is a tornado shaped 
pillar made from glass panels, the effect of all these glass mirrors is 
amazing. The design is definitely aimed at allowing everyone to see it as it 
doesn’t have stairs to get to the top, instead it has a slopped walkway that 
curves upto the top. I really liked this building.

From the Reichstag we followed the wall (the cobbled line) all the way to
checkpoint Charlie.



standing on the wall

 
Along the way we first saw 4 chunks 
of intact wall that was in between 
information cards. The information 
was very interesting and I loved all 
the graffiti on the wall sections. 
Better sections of the wall were found 
several km further up, here were large 
areas of untouched wall. Also on the 
streets next to this part of the wall 
were the famous gooseneck light posts 
that were in the no man lands area 
between 2 sections of the wall. This 
was the death stretch off the wall where 
hundreds of people tried to get from 
east to west berlin. We had a meal at a nice café and then went back to the 
hotel to relax.