This morning we paid a visit to the Reichstag, an iconic building in Berlin that houses the German parliament. The Reichstag's main attraction is the giant dome on the roof, which sort of looks like a big glass beehive. Inside, there are two ramps that wind around the outside to lead you up to (or down from) the viewing platform. If you look up, the very top of the dome is open to the air, under which there is a round bench where you can enjoy an awesome 360 degr...

Today we took a stroll down Bernauerstrasse, the street that was at the heart of the divide in Berlin. When the borders of the wall were first conceived, the street and the sidewalk were located in the west while the houses ended up being in the east. For a while this was considered an enviable position because these people could easily enter West Berlin through their ground floors. However, this didn't last as the houses were first sealed in, before being exprop...

To round out our perspective on Berlin's history, we paid a visit to the Berlin-Hohenschonhausen Memorial site. The memorial is on the grounds of a prison that was first used by the Soviets to persecute Nazis after WWII, before becoming a secret prison used by the Stasi, the State Security Service of East Germany. The Stasi were concerned with quashing all political dissent within the GDR, which manifested itself in a nightmarish surveillance state. The prison, w...

Today we joined a walking tour with Terry Brewer, the founder of Brewer's Walking Tours and a human storehouse of everything Berlin related. To describe Terry is a daunting task, but I would say that he's a pedantic stickler with an amazing capacity for historical detail. So as you can imagine, the tour was a double-edged sword: rich in history, but at the price of enduring the vagaries of mind of one who was hell-bent on dispensing every last bit of it. Regardl...

Our first day of exploring Berlin was really an eye opening experience. The city is just brimming with things to see and do, and the entire city seems full of good energy. Today we did our favourite day one activity: a walk through the city to get our bearings and a feel for the surroundings. We saw the unmistakeable TV Tower from the East Berlin era, which was considered an achievement in the DDR days but is actually quite a hulking eyesore. We also passed throu...