Berlin, Berlin

Two busy days being a tourist in Berlin. Yesterday Paul took me touring - we walked over to the check-point Charlie Museum, but didn’t go in. Then up Friedrichstraße - one of the main streets. Stopped for coffee and cake on the way (yum). Looked briefly the vw car dealership/museum - they have a classic combi hippie van on display. It was too clean and tidy to be a real hippie van. Then caught an S train across town to the radio tower (like sky tower) to book for dinner - unfortunately no availability. We then rented a couple of bikes and biked from there through to the Brandenburg gate, stopped at the Dom (church) and had a look inside and walked up to the top of the dome - good view. Then the length of the Tiergarten - a huge, and lovely park. Had lunch it a Bier Garten. Then back through the park to the parliament buildings - the queue was a couple of hours so we moved on. Some of the new govt buildings in this are really cool. At the river there is a 'beach' - really. Here is Paul on a sun lounger - notice how little competition he had to find a chair - it was about 12C.

Then looked at the DTR museum - a new, really little museum showing 'normal' life in East Germany in the 70's- 80's. Paul grew up in East Germany - though he was only 6-7 when the wall went down - he said it was pretty realistic. There was an interesting propaganda film of them building new housing areas, again Paul lived in one of these flats when he was very young. Got me thinking about what they are like now - more on that soon.

At 7pm (8 hours later) we returned our bikes and met up with Adam for a drink and dinner. A really enjoyable day.

This morning it was raining (as forecast), I excused Paul from tour guide duties for the morning and went shopping - it would be too cruel to ask him to go shopping. We meet up at lunch time and worked, yes worked (well I gave Paul a whole heap of work to do) till about 4. We had an hour or so to kill before we were due to meet up with Adam and Paul's mum, so I asked Paul if we could go out and look at the East German housing as depicted in the film. It is high density 'efficient' housing, but way better than the equivalent in the UK or Otara. The neighbourhoods and buildings look well maintained and like people care about their environment.

The public transport is fantastic - we took tram and trains back into the city and met up with the others to go to the bluemen show. Its mime - come drums/rock, very entertaining. We then all had dinner together and I said goodbye to Adam. Tomorrow I head for home.