Ground Control to Major Mom

27 July 22: On to our next adventure!! Pardon the candid selfie…

26 July 22: Currently there are tents set up just outside the Berlin Hauptbahnhof with medical and supply services for Ukrainian refugees, with signs welcoming them and pointing them towards they assistance they need. Tim can read Cyrillic somewhat and was able to decipher the signs for us.

26 July 22: If you’re on the former East Berlin side of the city, such as where we are staying, you see pedestrian signals like this one. Aren’t they cute?

They are called Ampelmännchen and have quite a cult following. There are entire gift shops dedicated to them (but I didn’t get to stop in any, but there is an online store). There’s a whole story behind how these caricatures came about…apparently the green signal is based on a profile shot of former GDR Premier Erich Honecker. The individual who designed them recognized that pedestrians could be of all ages and abilities and the colors may not be able to be deciphered by color blind individuals.

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.