Ich bin Berliner

(Sometimes a jelly doughnut, but today a Berliner.)

So, I was going to try & post some photos of St. Petersburg before we moved on to Berlin, but the limits on the hotel's free WiFi won't allow me to do that, so the pictures will have to come later. "Peter" (as we found out the locals call it) has many beautiful buildings, but I'm not missing the five-foot snow drifts or sidewalks with three inches of ice. ;) Berlin has neither!

Berlin also has many beautiful buildings, and its an interesting mix of old and new due, of course, to the war. The history here is amazing. Franco and I both expected references to WWII and the Holocaust to be subdued but it's quite the opposite. We saw the official Holocaust Memorial, which is quite new, but the tour guide explained that there were many other small memorials throughout the city. (We've seen a few of those as well.) We also stood on the spot where Hitler's bunker had been. It's now a parking lot, with just a simple sign marking the historical significance of the spot.

We had a three-hour city bus tour on our private coach this morning with a wonderful tour guide, originally from Canada but has been living in Berlin for 20 years. This afternoon we spent several hours at the DDR museum, which has many, many hands-on exhibits depicting life in East Berlin when the Wall was up. (We saw part of the Wall that is still standing as a memorial this morning as well.) The tour guide, who is my age, remembers visiting family in East Berlin and how, when they talked of her cousin trying to escape, would have to turn up the TV and move away from shared walls for fear of being overheard and jailed.

There are many sobering moments as you visit these sites, but they've done a beautiful and commendable job of handling the subject. Tomorrow we have a couple of class-related programs, but there will be time in the afternoon for a little more sightseeing. There's plenty of that to do!

Bis dann,
Laura