Another week has passed us by! It was the last week in the first quarter of school for the kids so that meant we were super busy trying to make sure everything was completed and turned in on time. The jury is still out on how successful we were.
It took over a year, but Matt and I are finally on a trivia team 😂! There is an Irish pub in our town that has English trivia on Tuesdays and a group of us finally put a team together and we came in third place out of ten! We are really looking forward to going back, even though the game doesn’t start until 9:30pm, which makes Wednesday mornings pretty tough.
Since this is the end of quarter for school, it’s another four day weekend. As soon as the kids were home Thursday, we hit the road for Berlin. Because the drive is usually 7+ hours, we planned on staying in Leipzig, about 4.5 hours away, for the night on the way. Traffic was horrendous getting out of Stuttgart and it ended up taking about 6 hours with stops just to get to Leipzig.
The drive was actually not that bad though once we got out of traffic. Very unusually, there were no clouds and since there was no moon, the sky was so clear. There is a meteor shower going on, and we saw the hugest, closest, shooting star we’ve ever seen. It was so close and looked like a firework being set off, fireball and burning tail included. I have to admit, meteor was not the first thing I thought when I saw it, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone as everyone on the autobahn started braking and traffic slowed as it shot straight across the road and burned out. Very cool though, once the panic was over and google told us there was nothing to worry about.
Friday morning, we did a short driving tour of Leipzig. Our neighbor told us as we were leaving that Leipzig was a “sehr schönes Stadt” aka a very beautiful city. We had previously just thought of it as a ex-East German, Soviet bloc city. However, our neighbor was actually right; it is really pretty and seems like there is enough stuff to do to fill a weekend. We definitely want to try to come back.
We made it to Berlin by about 10:30 on Friday and started at Charlottenburg Palace. The Palace is on the outskirts of Berlin but at the time it was built, it was the “country house” of the first King of Prussia, far outside of the city. We took a tour which was quick and interesting. We learned some about the old country of Prussia, and its Royal family. One of the highlights of the tour was the “Porcelain Room,” which is apparently pretty famous, although we didn’t know it at the time.
When we left Stuttgart Thursday night, it had been pretty chilly, but the forecast was calling for good weather and by the time we left the Palace around lunchtime, it was almost 70F and sunny.
We drove the rest of the way into Central Berlin and tried to check into our hotel. The room wasn’t ready so we set out on an epic walk to pass the time until it was. First stop was Potsdamer Platz, which was right down the street from the hotel. We would learn the following day, that during the 90s, this was the biggest construction zone in Europe. It was previously part of the “no man’s land” inside the wall of East Berlin. It was located at a turn in the wall so this huge area turned into a actual desert during the Cold War. Once the wall came down, they turned it into a huge commercial center. Seeing the sky-scrapers now, it is crazy to think what that nothing existed here 30 years ago.
After Potsdamer Platz, we made our way to the Brandenberg Gate. It was packed with people taking pictures so we only stopped for a minute and then grabbed some pizza for lunch.
We walked up to the Reichstag and grabbed some tickets to return to visit the building on Sunday. We headed back to Brandenberg gate and then walked all of the way down Unter Den Linden, which is Berlin’s version of Fifth Avenue, to the Berlin Cathedral.
We stopped and took a break at the cathedral because at this point we had been walking for about three hours. There were hundreds of people laying out in the park in front of the cathedral enjoying the rare weather.
After our break, we kept on going across the Spree River to the Berlin TV Tower. We had an appointment to go up to the Observation Deck. Ryan hates tall buildings, but we told him to wait to make his decision until we got there. As we were approaching, he said he would be willing to go up if we could go to the Lego Store afterwards. Since no one wanted to wait at the bottom with him, we decided that was a fair deal.
We got to the top and Ryan plopped himself at a table and proceeded to play on his phone while the rest of us checked out the views. It was easy to see the parts that were previously East and West Berlin due to the communist style block apartment buildings on the east side. We were able to make it around the whole tower in about 20 minutes and then went straight back down.
We told each kid they could choose a dinner one night on the trip and Brooklyn chose Nordsee, which is a fast food fish buffet. I know, right? Why would she, of all people, choose that? But, both kids love the fried shrimp boxes from there so I guess we got off easy money-wise. They even serve Aperol Spritz there so it was a win-win.
After dinner, we had to make good on our promise to take Ryan to the Lego Store. What we didn’t realize was that it was about a mile away. We power walked across town, found the store, got both kids new Lego sets, and finally headed back to the hotel, about seven hours after we had left, and thankfully, our room was ready for us.
Saturday morning, we had planned to do a walking tour. But during all the walking we did the day prior, we saw so many people on organized bike tours that we changed our plans. We are SO happy we did because it was the best tour we have ever taken. We saw SO MUCH more on the bikes than we would have walking, and it was easy and fun. Berlin is completely flat and has huge, dedicated bike lanes everywhere so it was an easy and fun city to bike in.
We met the bike tour in Nikolai Viertal, which is worth a mention, just because it was such a cute neighborhood, and looked quintessentially German. I assumed it was a section that had avoided bombing during the War. At the start of the tour, the tour guide informed us that this quarter was actually demolished and then re-built in the 90s to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of Berlin. So, with the exception of the church in the center, it definitely isn’t old, but still a cool place to visit.
Our bike tour took us all over Central Berlin. During the first half, we saw Humbolt University, the Berlin Concert House, the twin German and French churches, Checkpoint Charlie, and a remaining section of the Berlin Wall. The guide kept it interesting the whole time and told a lot of the unique stories about how people tried to escape East Berlin into West Berlin.
One of the stops on the tour was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews. From the outside, it looks like a bunch of concrete boxes. But as you walk through, the ground gets higher and lower and the boxes are varying in height. It’s built to be very disorienting and confusing and it is! It almost makes you dizzy to walk through it and its very easy to lose your bearings and the people you entered with.
We biked past the Brandenburg Gate and back to the park that borders the Reichstag and checked out some of the other government buildings and the Chancellery, where the German Chancellor works.
From the Government District, we could look out across the Spree River towards the new modern district of “Europa City,” built around the new Main Train Station.
We biked along the Spree back towards Museum Island. During this longer journey, Brooklyn ran into one of the other people on the tour and just about gave him whiplash. He laughed it off. Then, Ryan fell off his bike and in his embarrassment, laid himself out on the sidewalk and moaned until everyone on the tour got off their bikes to come and check on him. A few minutes later, Brooklyn side swiped a high sidewalk curb and tumbled off her bike over a parking bollard and had everyone from our tour and a couple of police officers running over to check on her. Throughout it all, no one suffered any serious injuries, but one man on our tour commented “two down, two to go,” and another fellow biker said they were going to give our family a wide berth for the remainder of the journey. 🤣🤣🤣
We finally made it to Museum Island, which we biked through. Museum Island is in the middle of the Spree and is supposed to have some of the best museums in the world. It is all based on Greek architecture and the streets have colonnades throughout. One of the most interesting things about the island is that it was the scene of man-to-man fighting in the last days of WWII and it is covered in bullet holes. The Germans do not cover up their history at all so have left the exposed bullet holes as a reminder of what happened here during the war.
We finally made it back to the bike shop. Matt did end up running into a parking bollard himself so I considered myself lucky to have escaped unscathed. They showed us a map of our route which showed we covered over 15 kilometers in about three hours.
After the bike tour, we grabbed lunch and hopped on a river cruise down the Spree. We cruised passed many of the same things we had seen on the bike tour, but it gave us a change to sit after riding so long and have some Aperol Spritzes.
Afterwards, we headed back over the Checkpoint Charlie so Ryan could pick up a souvenir he spotted during the bike ride. He picked out an authentic 1950s era gas-mask, which was an nice, albeit interesting, change from the helmets he usually gets.
Of course, we were still not done yet so we walked over to the Topography of Terror Museum. It’s an outdoor, but covered exhibition next to the Berlin Wall, which walks you through the conditions that existed that allowed the Nazis to take power and why the Germans went along with it. Some of the conditions were: financial unrest from the Great Depression, soaring inflation, fear of immigrants and them taking jobs, voter dissatisfaction with the ‘status quo,’ and massive propaganda and bias in the media. It definitely was a lot to take in.
Finally, we had dinner at Ryan’s choice, which was of course, an Asian noodle restaurant.
Sunday was our last full day and we took a day trip to Potsdam, about 40 minutes outside of Berlin. Potsdam is similar to Versailles in France, and Sintra in Portugal in that it is where the Kings of the country had their huge palaces outside of the capital. Potsdam was the home of the later Kings of Prussia until the country was dissolved in the 1920s.
There are about twelve palaces in Potsdam, all situated around a huge parkland. First, we toured Sanssouci Palace, which was the summer home of the Frederick the Great. It was actually pretty small by palace standards. In fact it was only one story, but he was considered a simple man and didn’t like living in a huge palace. The Palace is prettiest on the outside since it is set on the top of a hill in the middle of vineyards.
From Sanssouci, we walked about a mile through the park to Neues Schloss, or New Palace, which was Frederick’s winter home. This one was his more formal entertaining palace, so much bigger. The outbuildings, where the kitchens and stables were, looked like palaces themselves.
Inside, the most impressive rooms were the Shell Grotto and the Marble Hall. The Shell Grotto is a huge room that is completely tiled; ceilings, walls, and floors; with shells and other beach minerals. Considering Prussia had hardly any coastline, this was pretty impressive.
The Marble Hall is directly above the Shell Grotto on the second floor and everything but the ceiling is covered in over 80 tons of Italian Marble. Frederick didn’t want to ruin the aesthetic of the Shell Grotto below though by adding support columns, so the entire Marble Hall is supported by only cross beams. The result is that the Marble Hall has been on the verge of collapse since just a few years after it was completed. It has recently had all of the beams replaced so the palace is not about to fall down anymore, but people can still not walk across the floor.
After the palaces, we walked into Potsdam city and had lunch at a burger restaurant and got ice cream. We checked out Potsdam’s Brandenburg Gate, and then headed back to Berlin.
We got back in time to check out the Brandenburg Gate at sunset.
Then, we walked over to the Reichstag for our tour. We had chosen 5pm as the entry time because we were trying to time the sunset. We had forgotten thought that daylight savings time ended in Germany that morning though so the sun set around 4:30. It was almost dark before we reached the dome but we still enjoyed the visit and views.
The Reichstag is the German Parliament building. The Germans own their past and make everything a teaching moment. Our bike tour guide even mentioned that they learned so much about the cause and affects of WWI and WWII in school that they would want to vomit by the time they graduated. The themes of responsibility and accountability are brought into Reichstag. The Parliamentary Chamber has a glass ceiling and people can watch the proceedings from above. The message is, “Your people are watching you.” The Dome itself is a replacement of a previous dome that was destroyed during the war and natural light is brought down into the chamber via a tube of mirrors from the dome. Transparency and environmentalism tied up in one, so German.
After the Reichstag, our last stop in Berlin was Potsdamer Platz. We had peeked a Christmas Market a few days before and decided to stop in and at least get a gluwein mug. It felt so wrong to be there in October in T-shirts, but we all got our favorite treats, and then headed back to the hotel.
Berlin was so awesome! There is so much to do, we barely scraped the surface. The people speak German and have German attitudes, but it felt much more like New York City or London, as opposed to Munich or Frankfurt. None of use were expecting to like it so much, and were all surprised by it. It’s definitely secured a place in my Top 5 favorite cities.
Gilcrests Abroad 