Germany - Part 4, Second Day in Berlin

Sunday was our next day and we enjoyed Berlin. As I mentioned before, our hotel was located in the middle of downtown or "mitte." What I hadn't really realized was how close it was to Checkpoint Charlie, a famous US Army Checkpoint between west and east Berlin when it was divided by the Berlin Wall.

What is really strange is that there is no other sign of the wall around. It looks like a street in Manhattan. Upscale shops, dining, hotels and more bakeries. But right in the middle of the busy road you see the original Checkpoint Charlie and the original signs that went along with them. In a way it is like stepping back in time. As you will see below, you could pay 1 Euro and have your picture taken with the "guard."

We spent about 3 hours in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and only made it through 2 of the 3 stories of the museum. It was HUGE. It told everything of the stories about how people tried to escape the East side to the West. I took one picture in the museum of a Volkswagen Beetle that was used by the man that owned that house which is now the museum. He helped 55 people escape the East in that modified Beetle. I found out after that that you weren't supposed to take pictures in the museum so I didn't take any more.

It was very eye opening for me to see all the different ways people tried to cross the wall. There were so many contraptions, from hiding in 2 suitcases to flat out running across and being shot at multiple times. Then there were the water escapes. Did you know that every body of water near the border had a screen of metal with huge metal spikes on it, only 3cm below the surface? And that Scuba diving equipment wasn't sold on the East side for fear of people using it to escape. But that didn't stop them, they used pieces of whatever they could find and stolen oxygen tanks and did it anyway!

Or that people jumped out of buildings that were near the border to get across, or tunneled through them? It is simply amazing to me the lengths people went to to get OUT of the east side. It must have been really, really bad over there, to build a whole wall and such to have to keep the people IN! How very sad!

The pictures of us by the wall are in front of the museum with an actual section from the wall. We had such a great time but alas our 5 hour drive home was calling. We snapped a picture of the Brandenburg Gate on the way out. It was kind of funny because on the way out the GPS kept trying to have us drive through the Brandenburg Gate (which you can't).

On the way home we encountered some VERY heavy fog. It was kind of scary! But we made it OK. And had a great time the next day at Neuschwanstein Castle.