Wednesday, July 15

Another excellent breakfast. We said farewell to group 5 as they leave for Dresdan. We boarded the bus in the morning and traveled to Kulturprojeckte Berlin where Mr. Wolf Kühnelt and one of his assistants answered questions concerning culture in Berlin. It was interesting to hear how Berlin is planning to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall on November 9th. They are painting 2000 “domino” blocks which will be set up in Berlin and on that Monday, they will have a Domino Effect event where the first of these 2000 blocks will be pushed causing the remaining 1999 to fall.

We then walked to a memorial set up on the Peaceful Revolution at the Alexanderplatz. We saw many amazing photographs and heard about the last several weeks of the GDR and how the people of East and West Berlin demonstrated in a rather peaceful way and how several interesting events led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From here we were given a quick seminar on using public transit and traveled to Berliner Dom where we saw a very ornate Protestant Church dating back to 1905. It was very interesting going down into the crypt and seeing the tombs of many early protestant and government leaders from the Hohenzollern dynasty.






We then went for lunch along the river at an Italian restaurant. The salad, pasta and pizza was excellent.



We had the rest of the afternoon to ourselves. I spent the afternoon and evening with Dan and Nate. We figured out the public transit enough to get us close to the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, which is the site of the German Resistance, paying tribute to Staffenberg. It was very interesting seeing his office and many compelling photographs and posters by people resisting Hitler and the Nazis.






Next we went to Unter den Linden to do some souvenir shopping. We bought some small items for our loved ones at home and then went back to Alexanderplatz to see if there were any reasonably priced German national team soccer jerseys. We found some jerseys but were not willing to pay the price.

We then walked to a pub along the canal for a light supper. After supper I headed back to the shopping centre hoping to purchase a suitcase to replace the broken one I currently am using, but I missed the shops open times by half an hour. Just like Washington D.C., stores close here by 8:00 p.m. So, off to the hotel after finding a cache near the shopping centre.