Berlin Day 6

Friday the weather was glorious! It was the perfect weather for our planned activity, a five hour bike tour of the city! 

We woke up Friday morning (again with not enough sleep... we could hear late night socializing from the courtyard below) and headed down stairs to the hostel lobby for breakfast. They had plenty of options but it of course paled in comparison to what we had become accustomed to at the Intercontinental. However, we did get to eat outside near the hostel's garden and that was really pleasant. 

After we finished up breakfast we hopped on the metro towards to city center to meet for our bike tour. The tour met under this giant TV tower that reminds me a lot of the space needle in appearance and scale. It's in East Berlin and was built during the 1960's. Since all the engineers and architects left  East Berlin to go to West Berlin, the communists had to sneak in Swiss architects to design it. Which is funny because they built the tower mostly as propaganda to show off with a "look what we, and our government, can do" mentality. 

All the Fat Tire tour guides spoke English as their first language as did 90% of the people on the tour. It was strange and soothing to be in an environment where you could understand all the surrounding conversation. Our tour guide was an Aussie named Julian. There were a handful of Australians actually, a couple of folks from the UK and some fellow yanks. 

Our guide, Julian

After a brief introduction and adjusting our bikes we were off! Goodness it was quite scary at first biking through the city. The bike lanes go back and forth between being on the sidewalks, being on the road, and then sharing a lane with the buses! Ahhh!  and the cars go fast in Berlin and then you also have to dodge pedestrians too. Thankfully Berlin is very bike friendly - many people cycle as their main transportation. 

We hit up the major sights: old churches, Humboldt university, Gendarmenmarkt (Berlin concert house, French cathedral, and the German cathedral), check point Charlie, Berlin Wall, Berlin Wall watch towers, Hitler's bunker and suicide place, the murdered Jews monument, Berlin Victory Column, Brandenburg Gate, and the Reichstag.

Humboldt University

Konzerthaus Berlin Concert Hall (complete with an opera singing peacock dressed man...)

 The Neue Kirche (German Church) in the Gendarmenmarkt 

French Church in the Gendarmenmarkt (same design as the German one... only one is like 1 meter taller than the other)

Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall Watch Tower

(Originally they were occupied by two new and young army men. But after the government realized that they had a problem with the men shooting their partner and making a run for it to West Berlin they began assigning older, married men to the towers... men who had more to lose if they ran away)

Nazi Government Building (now the tax building)

Check Point Charlie

Check Point Charlie

Holocaust Memorial 

Reichstag (German Parliament)

Where Hilter's bunker is... now a parking lot. The German people want to forget it and not acknowledge it. 

The Brandenburg Gate

For lunch we headed back to the Tiergarten and stopped at a different Beir Garten. We sat as a group and the people we happened to sit next to both got engineering degrees from Georgia Tech and one of them actually worked as a contractor at Gulfstream!! What are the odds?! Miguel even designed a part that attached to something the other guy had designed way back in the day!! 

Lunch was actually in the middle of the tour so by the time we finished up we were both hungry. It was around 3 o'clock so neither of us wanted a large meal so we stopped by a local establishment on the way back to the metro. It reminded me of a German version of a Taco Mac except there are hardly any televisions here and the wait staff all wore German costume which tickled Miguel. There were two large, separate stag parties from Britain there that provided quite the entertainment and had Miguel and me laughing a lot! At one point one of the grooms removed his pants and I got quite an eyeful! We did end up table hopping some trying to avoid smokers. Miguel ordered two beers and I ate some desert pancakes. 

No beer for me

The Stag party... see the leopard print suit?

After our snack and relax time we headed back to the older side of town to our hostel. We changed into some warmer clothes and went out to explore the area. We saw an old church that had been badly damaged in the war. It was repaired a little bit but the devastation was still apparent. 

We walked for a bit till we found a restaurant that takes Amex. That's the only card we brought with us and we already ran out of Euros. 

The restaurant was Italian which we both felt kinda eh about (we'd rather try local cuisine if we can). I had spaghetti and Miguel had the biggest calzone I have ever seen. The food was fine. We sat outside and people watched. We had both crashed at this point so we're pretty excited to go back to the hostel and go to sleep.