In Berlin 

When we landed in Berlin, we met up with our grandmother (who lives in Texas) and then rented our car and grabbed something to eat at Burger King. After eating we went on a private bike tour back and fourth through east and west Germany.

The bike tour covered all we had wanted to see in the city and more! We saw: the TV tower, the Berliner Dom cathedral, Saint Mary’s church, Checkpoint Charlie, the Opera house, the Holocaust memorial, the site of Hitler’s bunker, the government building, Brandenburg gate, Humboldt University (where Albert Einstein was a teacher), and the book burning memorial.  Most of them were bombed in World War II and rebuilt afterwards.

Berliner Dom Cathedral

The outside of the Berlin Cathedral looks like a Roman Catholic Church. After we went inside, we were surprised to learn that was a Protestant church. Inside were four statues, both on the front and the back of the church, the four on the front were of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli and Calvin.

 

We learned that Luther and Melanchthon, and Calvin and Zwingly had different ideas about the Lord’s Supper. Luther and Melanchthon thought that the bread and the wine become the actual blood and body of Jesus Christ, and Calvin and Zwingli thought that they did it in memory of Him, symbolically. The other four statues were of the four princes that supported the new theology. There was also a very big pipe organ that looked cool. At the end we got to climb what felt like millions of steps to the top of the Berliner Dom. It was totally worth it, the view was fantastic, even though it was a rainy day.

The Berlin Wall

During the bike tour, the guide taught us a little bit about the Berlin wall. She used sidewalk chalk to describe the history. She told us the whole story about how Berlin was divided into two parts, East Berlin (the communist side) and West Berlin (the capitalist side). Because of the communism, the East Berliners didn’t have any freedom and the economy was terrible, so the people from the east started moving to the west. When the leaders from the east side found out that their people were moving over, they came up with the idea of the Berlin wall. The Berlin wall blocked the people on the east side from passing over to the west. The Berlin wall was built on August 13, 1961.

On the east side there were two walls, the outer wall, and the inner wall. In between the two walls was “No Man’s Land”, a dangerous area was filled with guard towers, land mines, sand, and traps. The guide told us a story about a family that worked at a East German government building (located in the No Man’s Land) that wanted to escape. The other people who worked there thought that the family was a loyal eastern family. One night, the man took a hammer tied to a rope and threw it to the other side of the wall where his brother caught it. The whole family was able to zip-line from the government building to the other side of the wall. The guards did see them, but they thought that the plan was so intelligent that they must be spies spying on the west side of the wall. Because of that, their family was able to pass safely into West Berlin.

Eventually, after the Cold War, the wall was torn down on November 9, 1989.

Our trip to Berlin was a great adventure. We made some great memories and learned some history, too.