Day 6: Berlin

May 22 -- Quote of the day: "I like Germans. I like how I live when I'm with them." -AC

Our plan was to get up early, eat a quick breakfast, and get out the door. We succeeded at the first part, but the breakfast at the hostel was so impressive that we had no chance of eating a quick breakfast. We had many different kinds of bread and yogurt and cheese and lunch meat and fruit and cereal and juice and coffee, cappuccino, and macchiato. The kids may have gotten a little over-excited about it all and stuffed themselves.

When we finally got out the door, our first stop on the train was Alexanderplatz, where we saw the TV tower and St. Mary's church. And we saw the outside of the Berlin cathedral, but we didn't go into that one. The TV tower was built by the atheist East Berliners to prove man's greatness in living without God. Little did they realize when they built it that the shadow that it would cast was in the shape of a cross. St. Mary's is a cathedral that is 700 years old but had to be mostly rebuilt after WWII.

Next, we stopped to see the Berlin Wall Memorial. We saw the only remaining standing section of the wall and walked a long way along where the wall stood, where the escape tunnels were, where people tried to escape, and the buildings, including a church, that were knocked down/blown up because they got in the way of the security of the wall. We also went to the Berlin gate and ate lunch on some grass outside the Reichstag. We walked to the site of Hitler's Bunker, which is now a gravel parking lot. And we walked through the Memorial for the Murdered Jews. It was a simple, yet fascinating memorial of concrete blocks in the shape of coffins, but of all different heights, which took up a whole city block. Our last destination before an ice cream stop and back to the hostel was Checkpoint Charlie, which was basically a tourist trap where we didn't spend much time. In all, we walked over 10 miles and rode at least 7 trains. And that, folks, is how you do Berlin in one day.