West End.

After a salutary start spending an hour in the information centre at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, something recommended and we felt we had to do, we headed into the west for the first time since our visit to the Reichstag on Tuesday.

We walked across the Tiergarten, a huge expense of wooded parkland in the very centre of Berlin and formerly in the British centre of West Berlin. This is an amazing space for a big city and we saw a red squirrel, I'm sure not uncommon here.Quite a long walk but as we were about to leave we found a place for coffee and stollen ( nice as it didn't have marzipan in it) where an Eisstock piste was being set up. This is a cross between curling and bowls on ice. We had seen it in action on Unter den Linden and it looked good fun.

We were heading to the former centre of West Berlin and remains the cities 'west end' with top end shops and hotels centred on the Kurfürstendamm or Ku'dam for short.
We wanted to return here as many years ago on our previous trip it was where we were dropped for the Christmas market after our city bus tour. The problem was the market wasn't open. So we went into a big department store called KadeWe (Kaufhaus den Westens)So what's so special about a dept store in a big city to make us return? It is the biggest in continental Europe but about 75% of it was of no interest to us. We came for the 6th floor. It is a gourmet's paradise with the largest collection of foodstuffs in the whole of Europe with many in-store food bars where you can eat.

We couldn't resist the Shrimp and Sardinas bar where we shared a Flammekuchen ( like a very thin pizza) topped with salmon  and shrimp with rocket and sun dried tomato.
You can spend hours here just looking around but we did go up to 7th floor eventually which is a glass domed Winter garden for a cup of tea. Apart from a brief visit to the china dept (more later maybe) that was it and we returned to the street. As you can see all was bling on the Ku'dam. The Christmas market was there but was mainly food stalls. The other interest here is the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche. A bit like Coventry the ruin has been left and a new church has been built alongside. (You can just make out the remains of the church on the right of the Christmas tree.) The new church is known as the compact and the lipstick. Concrete and octagonal the church (quite a carbuncle) and the bell tower are separate at either side of the ruin. They look most uninspiring until you enter. The square blocks of concrete contain blue/green squares of glass creating an amazing effect. (Through the trees you can just see a few blue squares in the bell tower) The effect in the interior can be seen in the extra.

Enough walking for today, we braved the S Bahn back. Decided to just eat at the nearby Christmas markets tonight. Felt we really ought to try Curryworst! We shared again and it wasn't bad with Bratkartoffeln - more up market than chips!

The Germans really know how to do Christmas. The two markets tonight were packed with people eating and drinking. Both had ice rinks with lots of people participating. Don't think I could cope with more than a few days but it has been great fun.