Ground Control to Major Mom

26 July 22: After our guided tour and food court lunch we hit the U-Bahn and hit three more tourist attractions.

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!

25 July 22: See that train station in the photo above? That’s the Hackescher Markt S-Bahn station, and it’s about 500′ from our apartment building. It was part of what I liked about the AirBnB we rented. This photo was taken from our AirBnB.

The station is closed for renovations until Thursday. The day after we leave Berlin. So we have to use the Alexanderplatz station which is about 0.4 miles away (2000′) which isn’t bad, but it wasn’t expected either.

25 July 22: More photos from the Schlosskirche — Castle Church — and the Luther House Museum, both in Wittenberg (or Lutherstadt Wittenberg, which is the name I should have originally used to search for train routes and maybe it would have saved us 1/2 hour or so).

25 Jul 22: Daily selfie from the Castle Church, Wittenberg. This is the church on whose door Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses (also known as the Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences) in 1517, leading to the establishment of Protestantism. This church has been renovated many times over since then.

More photos to follow later when I have better WiFi. So much train drama today. And it was a very warm day too. Not horrible, but annoying just the same…and wore us out pretty quickly.

25 July 22: Greetings from the Berlin Fernsehturm — also known as the Berlin TV Tower. About 275m up.

I could spend all day up here getting the lay of the land. There are awesome descriptions of what you see every 6 degrees of the compass rose.

25 July 22: After yesterday’s shenanigans, we have now figured out how public transportation is going to look from our apartment (numerous closures this week near us, both the S-Bahn and the trams are unavailable). We aren’t far from the Alexanderplatz train station, about 0.4km away.

24 July 22: Our AirBnB keys were being held for us at a restaurant across the street from the apartment building, the Eden Restaurant, which featured Vietnamese cuisine.

We decided to check it out the restaurant for dinner and it wasn’t bad at all.

24 July 22: We made it to Berlin! Our apartment is VERY spartan, definitely East German-ish. But again, the location can’t be beat!

We arrived just in time for the 9pm sunset…and now it’s dinner time!

24 July 22: They’re trying to make up some time. A nearly 1 hour delay will whittle down to about 30 min if it goes as planned.