When in Potsdam we discovered the public transport-system, including Potsdam, Berlin and every means of transport within the area, be it bus, tram, underground or train. All for one day-ticket, for an everyway acceptable price of € 7,70 per person. Well, did we use it, even twice recently! Only going up-and-down from Potsdam to Berlin is already cheap for this money.

Arriving at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Hauptbahnhof) is really impressive. It’s the largest train-station with crossing tracks of Europe and it shows.

An impression of berlin’s subway.

For several reasons, it’s close to where we arrived besides the fact that this is one of the best known buildings in the world –for bad and good reasons alike- the first thing we did was walk towards the Reichstagsgebäude (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_building) dating from 1894.

Whether on purpose or inevitable, one’s impressed by the building itself, the words ‘Dem Deutschen Volke’ and the gigantic flag. The German national anthem, by the way, is the most beautiful one we know of. Listen once more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCdP_E5Rc5Y.

What’s next? Of course the Brandenburger Tor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Gate). Here it (Tor = neutral, according to our German-Dutch dictionary) is, partly obscured by something to do with the 2018 FIFA World Cup. More about the latter later on.

Brandenburger Tor’s quadriga in detail. We know you know it, but we had to do it. Read about quadriga’s by using this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga.

On the east-side of the Brandenburger Tor (Pariser Platz – Unter den Linden) it’s possible to rent a horse-drawn carriage (we saw one even without horses – that’s cheating!). That’s not all that special, except when we see a carriage that is drawn by a pair of Frisian horses – our all-time favourite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesian_horse). They appeared to look smaller than usual, reason we initially thought to see a pair of Fell ponies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fell_pony). The charming lady, pictured as well, assured us that it is a pair of Friesians. She did not object against us making a picture. Maybe you’d think that is normal, but most of the other carriages had a message on them, pointing out that a picture only could be made after paying € 2,00. How do you check that, for heaven’s sake???

One of the first things we wanted to see (feel?) was the former Berlin Wall. According to our information Bernauer Straße is the place where more information is to be found. So that’s where we went…

The sign in front of this remainder of the wall tells us ‘The district of Mitte (a Berlin district, ed.) erected a three-meter-high inner wall between Strelitzer and Brunnenstrasse around 1975. It was the first obstacle from the East Berlin side and blocked the border strip from view. It was torn down in 1990, but some meters were left standing.’

Another point of interest, related to WW II, is the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church), mostly referred to as Gedächtniskirche. We did not find anything else than de very spot and made a picture of it. Again, for more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Wilhelm_Memorial_Church.

Alexanderplatz, another place of interest – if only because we wanted to visit an ‘Oil and Vinegar’-store. It is such a huge shopping-centre nowadays that looking for an information-desk is the first thing to do. We did that indeed and were glad, too, cause we’d never found the shop without help. It appeared we had to go to the reddish building in the centre background of this picture. Who would have known??