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.

Regardless, the tour took us to parts of Berlin that we might not have sought out on our own, including the enormous Soviet War Memorial that remembers those who sacrificed themselves during the capture of Berlin. We also visited Karlshorst, the site of the official German surrender that ended WWII. Our guide was indispensable here as he took us through the long and winding story of Germany's (double) rise and fall, in a museum that is regrettably only presented in Russian and German.

But perhaps the most memorable part of the tour was our walk along the East Gallery, where the largest standing portion of the original wall still exists. It is very hard to imagine a city like Berlin being divided by that concrete monstrosity for so many years. Truly remarkable.