Mon May 27 - 16:30 (Berlin)

This morning, I slept til 10:30. It was great since we slept on a bus the night before. Laura suggested we try Curry Wurst so that was the first thing we ate. It was two wursts (sausages) with seasoning and ketchup served with fries. The place we ordered from was right next to the D Bahn (train station) so we purchased our tickets to Amsterdam. Then we set off to find the Tiergarden. It was only a few U Bahn stops away.

We walked to the center where the Berlin Victory Column was. Inside was a museum that told the history of the Victory Column as well as many other German monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, and many other monuments made in the 1800s to celebrate the victories of the German Empire. The museum also had models of the monuments including a few exhibits of big monuments in other countries such as the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Empire State Building and more. We climbed the narrow, spiral staircase to the top of the monument. From the top, we had an incredible view of the Tiergarden and the surrounding Gate and the Reichstag in the distance. One more interesting thing to note is the Victory Column is where the Love Parade event was held.

After walking out of the Tiergarden, we took the U Bahn to Potsdamer Platz and saw the Berlin Wall. They had a project to mark the entire city with a line of where the wall used to be. Most of the wall was taken down, but they saved some parts of it. An interesting fact is they turned a lot of the open space from where the wall was to parks and open areas for the city. During the Cold War, the city continued to grow and space inside the city shrank so this was a perfect opportunity to have more open space in the city. I learned that the "Berlin Wall" was much wider than a wall because it was composed of 2 walls with an open space in the middle (maybe about 50 feet). This space was heavily guarded by both sides.

We are now writing in our journals in a Starbucks. We were going to eat a snack in the Sony Center nearby, but they didn't have any cafes open, only restaurants.