Our Daily Selfie from one of the few remaining meters of Berlin Wall.
26 July 22: Fun first part of the day exploring the city on foot with Eran, our guide for a Cold War Walking Tour of Berlin. He discussed the parts of life in East Berlin that you would never think about just from history books, like how train travel and water/electricity continued to function from inside the wall. I never had thought of that before!
We started at Friedrichstraße Station, the only rail border crossing in the city, then went to the Berlin Wall Memorial, which has one of three remaining sections of the wall. The area is known for having some of the only terrain suitable for digging tunnels, and is the first section of the wall that was (legally) breached on 9 Nov 1989.
The boys thoroughly enjoyed the tour.
Right now we are enjoying a mall food court lunch in Alexanderplatz. Captions are in the photos.
Breakfast of champions! Fresh bread from the bakery downstairs from us. I was the first one awake and could run downstairs before everyone else awakened!Eran, our tour guide. We started our tour at the Friedrichstraße Station.The border processing center at Frederichstraße was converted into a museum in the early 2000s. This was the ONLY place where you could transit between East and West Berlin via rail (Checkpoint Charlie was one of the few land-crossings).At the Nordbahnhof U-Bahn station. Eran explains how the trains could run through East Berlin but not stop. They’d pass straight through the “ghost stations”, marked with black dots…such as the one we were in at the moment.In the lower right of this sign, there’s an artist signature with a “’36”. So this is definitely “Nazi font”.Walls were built to block the entrances to the ghost stations on the borders. To keep East Berliners out. These bronze plates were placed down to commemorate where the walls were built.At the Berlin Wall Memorial. It’s gorgeous and a must see. It seems to be pretty recently completed.
This is a display of everyone killed trying to cross the wall. Only 140…as time progressed between 1962 and 1989, the attempts pretty much diminished to just a couple attempts per year.There are only 3 areas of original wall. This is one of the 3.
Our tour guide called it “Wall 4.0” and said “Wall 5.0” was in the works for the 1990s with embedded surveillance systems…but we all know how that went…This is a recreation of the wall complex as someone from the east would have viewed it. They couldn’t just walk up to the wall like in the west. They had to stare through a border about 150′ away, with a “Dead Man’s Zone” separating them from the real wall. To keep their residents in.A view down one of the streets today.The same view in 1990.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
Apparently East German families had to endure >10 year waits for these little things!After our tour we visited a massive shopping mall, hit the food court for lunch.Apparently Berlin’s most iconic food is currywurst…a sausage slathered in a sweet curry ketchup, eaten more as a snack food or appetizer than as a meal of its own. It’s cheap and quite filling. I ended up having it several times during my time in Berlin.
