Day 237, 26 February 2013, Berlin, Germany. Walking tour. We started out at 10.30 am thinking that the estimated 4 hours was highly unlikely - as it turned out, it took over 5 hours to see everything and have many and varied heated discussions amongst the members of the group and our great guide from Insidertours - Tarek. We started out at Hackescher Markt having successfully figured out how to get there in about 5 minutes flat after leaving the hotel a bit late. We wandered Museum Island, we saw where the Nazis burned over 22,000 books. We passed the University where Einstein taught. We saw the crystal domed Reichstag in chocolate and also in the distance. We passed the site of Hitler's Bunker (now a very unprepossessing block of Soviet era flats, with a Chinese restaurant Peking Ente (Duck) on the the site of Hitler's office within the bunker). The bunker area itself is now a carpark - handy having a guide to point these things out. The Jewish victims of the Holocaust memorial was thought provoking and also discussion provoking but the most interesting point for us was the previous site of Checkpoint Charlie. Not the fake, reconstructed Guard hut or the nutters in uniform asking for money in return for photos. It was the double bricked line in the ground showing the route of the Berlin Wall. Nearby is a section of the wall, now fenced off to prevent it being entirely chipped away. Next to it is the Topography of Terror (in the ruins of the SS and Gestapo HQ) - where the Nazis kept their meticulous records. It was an incredibly interesting tour and our knowledge increased. We finished at the Brandenburg gate and proceeded along the Unter den Linden - hard to believe we had been roaming freely throughout the old East Berlin area all day. We ended the day with what was supposed to be a brief visit to Historiale Berlin - a museum outlining Berlin's development from around 1200 AD when it was a fishing village on a swamp. All through it's glory days and then the darkest days of the the war. We passed the Berliner Dome on the way home and were particularly taken with it's sight by night (pictured) - as with the night time view of the book burning memorial in Babelplatz - a ghostly vision of empty bookshelves, designed to represent the phenomenal loss of ideas and intelligence during the book burning in 1933. There is also a particularly chilling quote, set into the ground, from a playwright in 1820... Translated it reads that whosoever burns books, shall end up burning people instead. Prophetic. Back to Alexanderplatz for the evening - and yes, another visit to our new favourite restaurant - Linh's Asian. Five nights in Berlin is just not going to be enough.