Europe Trip - Day 1 - Berlin, Germany

We woke up early morning to catch our flight to New york from where we had to catch the flight to Germany. After traveling for about 10 hours from New york we finally reached Berlin on May 20th at 10.00 AM. We took the bus from the airport to our hotel. A nice warm bath later we were all set to explore the historic city of Berlin.

Armed with maps of Berlin city, local bus schedules Rakesh was all set to take me to all the historic sites in Berlin. Our first stop was the Victory Column.

Victory Column in Berlin

The Victory Column is one of the most popular historic monuments in Berlin which symbolized the victories of war for Germany. We roamed around the tower admiring its architecture and the beautiful golden statue of Victoria. Little jet-lagged and tired we started hunting for some vegetarian food and water. Well, beer is cheaper than water in Germany looks like :). After paying around 10 euros for a average tomato and mozzarella sandwich and bottle of water we enjoyed our meal at a local street cafe with a view of the victory column.

Posing for the camera

After going around in circles for some time we finally got a hang of the city roads and hopped on the bus and headed out to Reichstag which is the parliament of Germany. Turns out we needed a reservation in advance to visit inside the building. Our 2010 Rick Steve's book did not mention that. Maybe the latest edition would have this information. After pestering the attendant there, lady luck smiled on us and we got an entry to building.

Rakesh at the Reichstag

We visited the dome and took a audio tour which explained about all the other historic and political buildings in the neighborhood which we could see from the dome. The Reichstag building has a beautiful glass dome at the top which gives a 360 degree view of the Berlin city. The dome itself has remarkable architecture and has lot of technology built into it for sun tracking and rain water collection for cooling.  Well that's the only part of the Reichstag that you can visit so you cannot really visit the debating chamber of the Bundestag(the German parliament). You can just peek into it from the dome. 

Inside the dome, Reichstag

Walking along from there we reached another famous attraction the Brendenburg gate and Parisian square. Brendenburg gate is the only remaining gate of a series of gates in the former Berlin Wall. The gate itself was very beautiful and has a lot of historic importance as when the Berlin wall fell lot of people gathered here to celebrate the freedom. We found a Starbucks at the square and had our fix of caffeine and sugar. The weather was nice and sunny so we enjoyed our coffee on the street side tables where we could see some local artists perform. This area was full of tourists though we did not see many Indian tourists there. By now we had become familiar with some German words for hello, thank-you, bye etc so we started greeting people with those.

Brendenburg gate

Next up was the memorial of the murdered Jews. The memorial has a maze of about 2000 plus varying sized hollow graves to commemorate the murdering of Jews. After spending few moments here we headed to Unter-den-linden road. This road has a bunch of beautiful structures like Humboldt university, princess palace, Friedrich the great's palace, memorial of mother who lost her husband and child in world war and few impressive cathedrals. This is a nice walk to explore the various sites in Berlin.

Murdered Jews Memorial

By now our feet were killing us but carrying on with our vacation spirit we reached the Charlie checkpoint. Also Rakesh is a big history buff so there was no chance that we would miss any historic sites in Berlin.

Rakesh driving the car through the Berlin wall :)

Charlie checkpoint was a well known passing point between East and West Berlin during the cold war. So today it has become a symbol of separation between the west and east during the cold war. 

Charlie checkpoint

Finally after a nice meal, we hopped on a train and got back to our cosy hotel.

For more pics of the day.