July 25, 2015

We are just wrapping up our time in Berlin, Germany. We spent 4 days here and really loved it! We arrived here from Dresden in the afternoon and made our way to our campsite just outside of town. It wasn’t the best campsite we’ve been to, but we had a nice spot right on the river for our tent, so that was nice. The tent pitching area was dirt instead of grass, so it got pretty muddy when it rained one of the nights, but it wasn’t the end of the world. That first evening, we just hung out at the campsite and found a grocery store nearby to stock up our food supply for the next few days. We also planned out how we would be spending our time. We decided that for the first day, we wanted to do one of the city tours since there is SO MUCH to see in Berlin. We knew that we could walk around on our own, but we wouldn’t get a lot of the info on the history of places and that a tour would give us a better lay of the land for the next few days. We decided to take a bike tour…it was a lot of fun! They had a trailer bike for Hayden so that he didn’t have to ride on his own. (LOTS of traffic) We had a great time cruising through the city and we definitely saw much more than we would have walking and got closer to things that a bus tour would have taken us. We were really happy with the bike tour.

Berlin really is an amazing city. All of the history with WWI, WWII, the USSR occupation of Berlin, the history of the wall, etc. One of the things that I didn’t realize is that many of the buildings, although they look old, have been recently rebuilt since they were destroyed in the bombings. During the time that the wall was up, many of the old buildings that had been bombed out just sat there. Once the wall fell, the German government began to rebuild the buildings to look like they did before they were destroyed.

Our favorite stop along the tour was the site of the wall and Checkpoint Charlie. Our guide was great about giving us the history of Checkpoint Charlie and giving us a quick history lesson on the wall. We got to stand with one foot in East Berlin and one foot in West Berlin. We also went to the site of the famous book burning in front of the University. They have built an underground memorial that was pretty cool.

Another great memorial was the Memorial to the Jewish people that died under Hitler. It’s a huge open square with rectangular blocks of all different sizes. You can just hang out and sit on the blocks or walk through the maze of them. An interesting fact is that while they were building the memorial, they discovered that under the site was a bunker that belonged to Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. Despite some controversy, they still built the memorial on the site. After that, we saw the bunker where Hitler stayed for the last days of the war and where he killed himself. The bunker has since been filled in (they tried to blow it up, but it was too thick) and paved over to be a parking lot. There is nothing to really mark it except for a small billboard parking the spot.   Apparently, the only reason that they installed the placard was because people kept knocking on the doors of the locals to ask where the bunker was located…they put up the placard so that the locals would be left alone! Lol At the end of the tour, we had dinner at McDonalds (Hayden’s choice), then went back to the campsite.

The next day we went back into town to get a better look at some of the places that we went by on the bikes. We just kind of bummed around and walked a big loop around the city. We did end up finding a pretty cool Science Museum that was an exhibit on medical technology that was actually pretty cool. We also went to the Neues Museum that had a huge Egyptian exhibit. Hayden really liked it, but we have a hard time getting excited about an Egyptian exhibit after being in Egypt and seeing the things for real! On the way back to the train station, there was a street vendor with HUGE bubble wands for kids to play with…we hung out there for a while and Hayden had a great time making bubbles!

Today we had a serious day and spent the afternoon at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin. The camp has been set up as a memorial to the people that were held here. They have a few of the buildings still standing that they have put together out of the salvaged materials from the site. The exhibits and information was very good, and very sad. They had one of the barracks set up the way it would have been with the beds all squeezed together, the bathroom for all of the people and even a section of the prison, including the solitary confinement. There were several personal accounts from people that had survived their time in the camp, what a terrible experience it must have been. It was a good (although sad) day and very eye opening. I know it’s still a little tough for Hayden to grasp, but hopefully in the future when they talk about WWII in school, he will be able to think back about it.

Tonight we have been planning the next few days. We were originally going to go to Copenhagen, but it’s crazy expensive, so we decided that we are going to skip it after all. Instead, we are going to spent three days in Billund at LEGOLAND!!! It just seems wrong to be so close to the home of Legos and NOT visit the park! J Hayden is super excited (and so is Adam). We’re going to take the train up Billund tomorrow and spend the night camping at the park. We got two day tickets so we can spend Monday and Tuesday in the park all day. After that, I think that we are going to continue north up to Sweden/Norway.