Our last morning on the ship. Our last 250 grams of smoked salmon..

We travelled by train from Warnemunde to Berlin and caught a short taxi ride to our hotel. Looks like I made a good choice. We have a little balcony overlooking Französischer Dom next to Gendarmenmarkt (historic French church and market square). The shops we passed on the streets nearby included all the fancy nancy ones, such as Gucci et al AND there was a Ferrari parked outside our hotel!

Gendarmenmark square dates back to 1700, part of King Friedrick I's plan for the new quarter Friedrichstadt where the recently expelled French Protestants (Huguenots) had settled following the Edict of Potsdam in 1685 which granted them asylum in the Prussian capital.

We did a bit of site seeing in the afternoon and walked to the Holocaust memorial. This is 2,711 concrete slabs (stelae) arranged in grid formation on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 m.
Apparently the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. When I read this description after walking through the memorial it certainly resonated with me.

Around the corner was the Brandenburg Gate. The gate is the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, the boulevard of linden trees, which led directly to the royal City Palace of the Prussian monarchs. It was commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a sign of peace and built from 1788 to 1791.

During the post-war Partition of Germany, the gate was isolated and inaccessible immediately next to the Berlin Wall. The area around the gate was featured most prominently in the media coverage of the tearing down of the wall in 1989, and the subsequent German reunification in 1990.

Moving further around the corner we viewed the Reichstag (parliament) building briefly before turning back to the fancy shopping district. Anthony bought some comfy walking shoes and we wandered back to our hotel. When we got back I realised the hasty stop at Reichstag had meant we had missed the Reichstag Dome (Anthony was on a mission). Oh well there's always tomorrow.

As we had a free drink voucher from the hotel we sat out on the footpath drinking our wine and beer watching the world go by. We saw a bunch of guys on a contraption that allowed them to all sit around a table with a beer while pedalling as one down the street. Then there were horses and carriage clopping past followed by some mini hot rods.

Next stop was across the road to the Gendarmenmark square and the Konzerthaus Berlin. We found a nice cafe for a Croque Monsier for dinner and watched children blowing giant bubbles while listening to street performers. We then walked back to our room and sat on our balcony to enjoy the view.