Around Berlin

After another lovely breakfast, we made use of our on/off bus ticket again and headed to the GDR exhibition, which was about life under the Soviet state before reunification of Germany.

It was very busy and therefore quite hard to see everything, but we got the gist of the kind of life people led then.  Some of it was good, in that they appeared to have security of jobs and houses, but in other ways it seemed they had little freedom, particularly freedom to travel in their own country and elsewhere.  However, many of the pictures and stories were happy ones, life seemed less affluent than in the West, but for ordinary people everyone was in the same boat.   These are only the comments of the foreign observer though, and it might not be so.

We then walked to the Brandenberg Gate, and had some coffee in the precinct of the huge square there.  There were lots of people, buskers of all kinds, children playing around them, and it was a very happy place to be.

Then on a sombre note we visited the Holocaust Museum along  Friedrich-Ebert Strasse.  It was designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman and is deliberately disorientating, 2,700 concrete pillars of differing heights and no designated exit or entrance.  There is an information centre underneath the memorial. 

We finished off our sightseeing for the day by visiting a small remaining part of the Wall built by the GDR, which separated the city from 1961 to 1989.

We missed the last on/off coach back to Alexanderplatz, so took the U-Bahn back to our hotel, and after chilling for a bit, we had a nice meal in the hotel restaurant.

Another lovely day, very interesting and the weather is perfect.