On the website it says the tour lasts 4 hours, but in reality for us it was more like 5 hours.  We started by taking the train east to Hackescher Markt where we met up with a few more people for our tour.  This time of year, and on a damp chilly day,

Hackescher Markt was quiet, but it looked like a great place to explore on a nice day.  We walked on over the Spree River onto Museum Island.  Here Mike pointed out the Altes and Neues Museums and gave us a good tip that if you want to buy a museum pass that it is best to go to the Altes Museum as it is the quieter of the two and so ticket lines are shorter. We then walked a short distance into Lustgarten where we had a great view of the front of the Berlin Cathedral with it’s lovely Dome roof. Mike mentioned that you can go up and walk around the Dome and get a great view of the city from up there, so I made a note to come back and try to do that.

From here we made our way onto Unter den Linden, essentially the main street of Berlin that runs through the Brandenburg Gate and down the middle of the Tiergarten.  We stopped at the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) to see the Memorial to the victims of War and Tyranny, then on to the Bebelplatz where the book burning Memorial is.  This memorial really hit home for me as a book lover, the Bebelplatz was the site of one of the infamous Nazi book burnings on May 10th 1933.  It consists of a simple window in the ground through which you look down into a room with empty bookshelves that could house 20,000 books, the number that were burnt that day.  As you look down into it, you also see your reflection in the glass that reminds you to reflect on what happened that day. A fairly simple, but very effective memorial I thought.

After walking through the Gendarmen Markt where we passed the Concert House, another fabulous building with matching churches at each end of the Square, we then took a short lunch break.  At the beginning of the tour I had struck up a conversation with a couple from Australia who were also on the tour, so for lunch they invited me to join them as we quickly brought a small sandwich and coffee and devoured them before Mike gathered us all up again to continue the tour.

 Mike gave us a bit of an overview of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall before taking us on to see the Checkpoint Charlie site, one of the best known of the border crossings during the Cold War.  This is mostly a tourist photo opportunity spot now, but you can still get a feel for how it was from some of the pictures on display and copies of the signage and guardhouse.  A little further on we were able to see the last remaining standing section of the Berlin Wall, however, where it used to run is now marked by 2 rows of cobblestones running along and through the streets.

Our next stop was the site of the Bunker that Hitler committed suicide in in 1945.  The Bunker it’s self is no more, all that remains is a sign next to an apartment building car park, but the sign shows a map of what would have been below your feet back in the 1940’s.  Ironically just a short walk way is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aka the Holocaust Museum.  There is a large above ground grouping of blocks in different shapes and sizes which you can walk among, and below ground there is an information centre (which we didn’t go down to on the tour, and a few days later when I returned, there was a long line so I never did get to see that part).

The tour finished for the day by the famous Brandenburg Gate in the Pariser Platz, once a symbol of division during the Cold War, but now a National symbol of peace and unity.  Our guide Mike took the time to talk to us all about how we could find our way onto our next place or how to return to the Zoo.  Apparently from here it would take me about 45 minutes to walk back to my hotel near the Zoo, so I decided that the bus was the way to go as I was running short on time to get back to meet up with my husband.  From the Brandenburg Gate, Mike explained that if I walked over to the street next to the Reichstag Building, Scheidemannstrasse, I would find a bus stop for the 100 bus route that would take me back to the Zoo Station, and this proved to work well.  On my walk from the Station to the hotel I stopped at a pretty little café next to the Intercontinental Hotel, called Café Minouche.  I ordered a cappuccino and Brownie to take with me and the lovely man behind the counter was so sweet and told me in broken English that I was lovely and blew me a kiss – I think he just liked my British accent! 😉  I got back to the hotel happy but tired after a great day seeing the sites of Berlin and enjoyed my cappuccino and Brownie as refreshment. The Famous Insider Walk had been a great to get a good overview of the City.