Travel days; overnight in Berlin

It was eight hours by train from Copenhagen to Berlin. I was lucky to be seated in a cabin with a family from Melbourne, and passed most of the trip talking with them.

We saw a number of engineering marvels (wind farm in the ocean, intercontinental bridges) but the best of these was a ferry which took our train from Denmark to Germany. Quite astounding.

I took no photos of anything. I was in Berlin only long enough to walk around for some air and get irresponsibly drunk with Germans.

No pubs, still crawling

We weren't early to rise after the pub crawl the previous night, and it was well after noon when we made our way to Freidrich Strasse to start sight seeing.  Just outside the station we found this statue, which I had never seen before.

It's dedicated to the Jewish children killed in the holocaust, and bears the inscription "Trains for life; trains for death."

We began walking along the very up-market shopping district.  Outside the Mini store the Liar came up with the following idea for a photo:

We joined the 4pm walking tour (since the sun often doesn't go down until well after 8pm, this 3.5 hour tour suited us well).  Although the tour hit all the major tourist stops, my favourite photos were just of the colours of Berlin.

In particular, the contrast with the communist mural which adorns the side of the German tax office was interesting.  This building, by the way, is vast, and the Scoundrel insisted on referring to it as our "away ground."  This was, in the second world war, the Luftwaffe command center, and during the communist era became the Ministry of Ministries.  Now it's the tax office.

Of course we were all very interested in seeing Checkpoint Charlie... well, interested.  We walked past it, anyway.  I even took some photos.

Outside the concert hall stands a statue of Freidrich Schiller, poet, philosopher, friend of Goethe.  And what I can only assume are his 'bitches.'  I'm curious why so many statues feature women slanketed about the subjects legs or feet.  I thought this was something only Conan did.

The last photo I'll include from this tour is of the Berliner Dom, or Berlin Cathedral.  It was built in the 19th century, but designed to look much older in order to compete with St Paul's in London and St Peter's in Rome.  If you're trying to figure out which architectural style it's in, the answer is "all of them."