Thursday 5th June

Out of the hotel by 7.30 to catch a bus for Berlin. For the next 11 hours we travelled east to Berlin via Leipzig, complete with 4 bus company operatives. Apparently it was its first run on this route & it was quite a journey, all done on autobahns except for about 20km. It was quite noticeable how run down some of the buildings were in former eastern Germany although there has been quite a lot of redevelopment in some parts.
Finally we arrived in Berlin & followed Jane's carefully documented instructions to find our hotel, a large refitted E German office complex not too far out of town. After a scratch meal we turned in exhausted as If we had driven the bus ourselves.

Friday 6th June

Had an excellent breakfast from a massive range of foods & set out to catch a Hop on hop off bus on which we did a complete circuit in about 2 ½ hours. Berlin has many fine buildings & leafy wide streets & looks quite a pleasant place in many ways. The various palaces & parliamentary buildings, cathedrals & churches seem to date mainly to the 18th & 19th centuries. After some coffee & a lot of water we set off to catch the bus again to the Jewish Museum but stumbled upon St Mary's, 700 year old, protestant church. Here we were just ready to leave when a lady announced tin German & then English inviting people to see the organ in its loft at the back of the church.
Up we trooped & were then treated to an explanation, for the next hour, in both languages of how the 4000 pipe organ worked. Her knowledge was superb & her demonstrations of the organ’s capabilities was fascinating. It was obvious that she loved her work & cherished the instrument, originally built in 1722. As we sat just behind her we could see how much coordination of hands & feet was involved & we were truly stunned at having such a lucky break. Finally she played a a series of variations which illustrated her points & after the recital somebody asked who wrote the variations. "I did", she said.
We then set out for the Jewish Museum about 2.5 km away & this again was fascinating & frustrating, in equal parts. It comprises an old & a new, building connected underground by a stairway & tunnel & we found the logic very difficult to understand. The audio guide was good but the sequences were bizarre although the messages re the history of German Jewry was very complex & their fortunes have been very mixed. It was a surprise us that about ½ the German Jews survived the war as they had migrated before it became impossible to do so. All in all an extraordinary building which we felt was clever but didn’t function anywhere nearly as well as the one in Melbourne.
To get home we decided to try to catch the bus at Check point Charlie but we missed it as it stopped about 200m short. So we had to walk back about 4km, much to our annoyance. Again luck was with us, as we found a pub cafe on the way & both ordered 'Grilled pig’s leg, bread & mustard’ & a beer, although we weren’t sure quite what would arrive. We needn’t have worried as what came were 2 baked pork hocks with the meat falling off the bone & excellent, dark brown bread, all for about $15 each. That made the journey home seem a lot easier

Saturday 7th June
Up early today & had an excellent breakfast before visiting the local Aldi where bottled water was 19c a 1.5 L bottle & they had very cheap mens shirts but only in size 5XXL, which we could only boggle at. Then we took a tram & a train to Zoo Garden, an upmarket area in West Berlin, to start our tour of Potsdam. Here nearly all the shops were of designer labels & luckily, most weren’t open as they start at 10am. Potsdam is about 30km SW of Berlin & is on an island accessed by bridges. Apparently it was on the border between West & East Berlin & on one bridge prisoner exchanges occurred in the cold war.
After touring around the town we eventually came to 'Sanssouci’ the summer palace of Frederick the Great built in 1744. He must have been quite a remarkable man as he was a successful general & also was very interested in the arts & was apparently an accomplished flautist. In the gardens next to the palace he is buried under a plain grave stone slab along with 11 of his dogs. On the slab each day people put potatoes as he introduced the potato to Prussia. The single storey palace is about the size of a medium sized UK country house but its interior in the French style of the period is somewhat over ornate for our tastes. The workmanship however was excellent & it was a good tour.
Returning to the start point we caught a hop on hop off bus & went to Gendarmenmarkt, a square with what looked like 2 domed cathedrals at each end & a large library between them. One of the churches was closed but the other turned out to be a museum on German democracy. Here we sat down & were accosted by a lady who told us the building’s history & presented us with a 400 page book on the topic, much to our embarrassment. Off again on the bus we hopped off at the protestant cathedral & walked across the river to have a drink only to find that we were near the DDR Museum.
This was another find as, although it is not very big, the interactive displays cover the rise and fall of the East German regime until its collapse & the re-unification of Germany very amusingly indeed. It was particularly interesting to us as we are staying in the former East German part of Berlin & the architecture shows it well. It was fascinating to see what a mess the regime got into & how cruel it could be, often more by its incompetence than its intent one felt. Life must have been very difficult for most of the population under it & it would be hard to mourn it but some of its aims particularly on housing were paralleled with work done in Australia & the UK at the time in the push to build massive apartment blocks rapidly.
At about 7.30 we left it & took a tram home as we had seen a Vietnamese restaurant close by but were dismayed to find that it was closed. We ended up at an Italian restaurant & had a good meal there.