Berlin July '09 - 2

Waking up in a house, on a sofa, in Berlin. We walked along the Karl Marx Allee, a monument to post-war Soviet architecture and what was going to be the New Berlin, but they ran out of money, now where have I heard that before. Visiting the Communications tower is a must and true to German efficiency, we bought our tickets, they took my mobile no. and said they would send an SMS when it was our turn to go up. Brilliant as it gave us time to discover a great bar just around the corner called ‘Kase Koenig’ it was a standard German bar with serious food and lots of the locals eating there, always a good sign. Pork Knuckle (codillo) Sausage and large beers are what you need before being whisked into the skies. The view from the top of the tower is spectacular, well, a clear blue sky helps, so you could see forever. Back down to earth and a stroll along the ‘Unter den Linten’ the major street in town to reach the Brandeburg Gate. All around there are photos of ‘then and now’, and around the Gate were the major embassies, the RAF, the US 8^th and the Russians flattened most of that and now it has been re-built and the pictures are quite spectacular. The Reichstag is right beside it and that is another landmark building. There was a mega-queue to get in and we don’t do mega-queues. On the other side of The Brandenberg gate is the Memorial to the Holocaust. It’s an experience and quite the conceptual piece though what it all means is beyond me. I’ve visited Auschwitz and that’s a conceptual construction. Curiously enough, just a block away, is the site of ‘Der Fuhrerbunker’ which is now the car-park for a block of flats. Apparently the structure is still there, albeit flooded. Another curious thing about Berlin being that the water table is quite high. To round off the days excursion we had a beer in the Sony Center, in fact we had a meter of beer. This was right on the wall and it was the Western answer to Soviet Architecture, it’s a 70’s hodge-podge of sky-rise and looks totally out of place especially when compared to the older buildings and vacant lots on the ‘East’ side.