Just to summarise this walking tour... it is fantastic! It is FREE and probably the best guided tour I have ever had. Well, it's not actually free, the guides work for tips... so they are very very good because otherwise they don't get tips.
Their website is here: http://www.neweuropetours.eu/ and I recommend people go if they are heading to London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam or Edinburgh.
Ok now onto the tour itself. We met our tour guide Katie, who was an over-energetic very-excitable extremely loud American... and that description is an understatement. But, once you got used to her, she was very well informed, entertaining and passionate about Berlin. I learnt so much on this tour that it would be half a novel to write it all down :-)
We started at the Brandenburg gate, which is one of the most famous things in Berlin. It has been around since the Prussian-Empire, and was part of the Berlin wall.
We then went onto the Jewish Holocaust memorial which was quite cool. Nothing in your face, just a bunch of blocks. Then straight onto Hitler's bunker... which was a parking lot :-P The soviets destroyed it when they took over East Berlin. We then walked past the Nazi Luftwaffe headquarters where they were still doing some filming for the movie. And again saw Checkpoint Charlie, which Katie called the "Disneyland of Berlin" because everything about it is fake. The only original thing left is a sign saying "You are now leaving the American Sector".
This was the half way point (after 2 hours) so we stopped for a bite to eat. The cafe we stopped at had an English menu... it had the UK and USA flag (normal) + the Aussie and NZ flag, I felt proud for our nation to make it onto a Berlin menu :-P It was at this point I realised there are only 4 main countries with English as their primary language... so you wonder why it is the international language now don't ya :-P
The tour continued through Potsdamer Platz which is a new part of Berlin. It was pretty cool, after the fall of the wall, this place was empty. So they decided to let a bunch of architects go nuts and make all these cool high-rises there. The most famous building is the Sony Centre.
We then walked to the main concert house of Berlin. There were identical churches either side of it... strange. Katie explained the story. The Swedes invaded in the 16th century and killed a lot of Berliners. They used evil ways such as tying a bunch of Germans together and having competitions to see how many they could kill with one bullet, and forcing them to drink the "Swedish Cocktail" which consisted of raw-sewage (which of course will kill you). After the Swedes left the population was decimated, so they got some French Huguenots to help repopulate. The Frenchies demanded something for their efforts... which was church #1. The people of Berlin wanted something too since they had to go through the atrocity... so they built the exact same church so no-one would be offended :-P
We walked through the square where the famous Nazi-book-burning took place, there is a memorial that is simply empty bookshelves. The tour ended in the Lustgarten where Ruth and I were the night before. I learnt a bit about the place here too. This is where the tour ended... but first we heard the best-part-of-the-tour (Katie had been talking about this all the tour). It was the story on how the Berlin wall came to fall.
Now the Berlin wall officially was opened in 1989 (only 17 years ago!), and it was all a mistake. To make a long (and very entertaining presentation ala Katie) story short. A new "travel policy" which would allow travel from East-to-West. The proper policy was supposed to involve so much paperwork that nobody would actually ever be able to travel. Günter Schabowski, the person who held press releases, had not been properly updated about this as he was on holiday before the press release. During the live press release, they asked him some questions about it and he mis-read the quote. Thousands of people swarmed the boarder guards and in the confusion, they all got through. This event triggered the government to allow travel because once the people had been let out once, they couldn't keep them caged anymore.
(That is the very brief version)
It's amasing how recent the history of Berlin is... in our lifetime this occurred peoples!
Anyway, that was the end of the tour, so Ruth showed me around some of the Eastern Quarters, a bit off the tourist track. I got to see some of the soviet buildings and statues which are quite different to the German ones.
We stopped here for dinner, which was Chinese Hot-Pot (very yummy). The owner was very friendly. He was retired and decided to start this restaurant just for fun, because he liked the cuisine when he was in China. He lived in West Berlin during the Berlin wall days and told us about the times then. It was party time for West Berlin, everyone had "reverse-tax", i.e. you got 10% more than you earned from the government. And everything was made easy to keep people in Berlin! A vast contrast to the communist East Berlin.
After dinner we checked out a small cocktail bar and had a drink. Walking on our way home, we stopped at a "horror-rock" bar, which was cool! It was called "Cathedral"... and was anything but. Skeletons on the wall, and skulls on the beer taps. Main clientèle were of course Goths.
After seeing this part of the city we found our way home via bus... it was a relatively early night and we were home in bed at about 2 or 3.
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