Berlin

We left Warsaw central Station mid morning and it was raining at the time. The journey took about 5 hours and included many stops in Poland. We crossed into Germany at the river Oder, where a couple of armed police entered the train and walked through the train. We continued onto Berlin and arrived at the new central station about mid afternoon.

The Berlin Central Station was opened in 2006. It has several levels of track and includes a shopping centre.

Our Hotel in Berlin, a 10 minute walk to the station and a further 15 minute walk to the Brandenburg Gate. A very comfortable room with a kitchen and a balcony.

We passed this lady looking out onto the street every time we walked past on our way to and from our hotel.

This is the German Parliament house called the Reichstag and houses the lower house of the government called the Bundestag. The upper house called the Bundesrat represents the 16 federal states and meets somewhere else.

This is us at the top of the glass sphere on top of the Reichstag. From here you can look down into the chamber and see the members sitting at their desks when parliament is sitting, which wasn\’t the case when we visited.

One of the main shopping streets in west  Berlin is Kurfurstendamm. It has all the big brand names and the major store KaDeWa, a 6 level superstore loaded with expensive and exclusive goods. The sculpture by Brigitte Matschinsky & Denninghoff Martin Matschinsky consists of 4 tubes reaching upwards but not touching and symbolises the closeness and yet isolation between the then 4 partitions in Berlin. Next is the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtnisirche, a church but the builders left the ruins of the old one which was destroyed in the war as a reminder of the destruction caused by wars.

Part of the Tiergarten in Berlin. A 270 hectare inner-city park. Similar to New York\’s Central Park and London\’s Hyde park.

Situated around Berlin are series if these pipes. Apparently Berlin is built on a soil substructure that has lots of water and this water is continually pumped out of the sub-soil in building sites. There are also pink pipes that do the same job but by another company, All pipes empty into the many canals in Berlin.

Part of the Berlin wall in the former East Berlin. The wall was started in 1961 and destroyed in 1992 after reunification. There is still about a km of the original wall left in Berlin. The image is one of the soviet leader Brezhnev kissing the East German leader Erich Honecker.

This is one of the many shopping plazas\’ and squares in Berlin. This one is the  Alexanderplatz under the Berlin Communication Tower.

On our second day in Berlin there was a tropical like downpour that lasted several hours and caused some disruptions to the traffic and subways. Kay and I got rather wet that afternoon. The next day the weather was great.

While in Berlin we passed a section of Kurfurstendamm where there was a gathering of portable organ grinders having a demonstration. The array of organs and costumes was very colourful and noisy. We also saw again the BMW test vehicle we saw on our very first trip to Berlin with Pam and Don at the start of our holiday. Seemed like they hadn\’t advanced much on the original design.