A Round the World Adventure

In Berlin, we were amazed at the way the old met the new. We wandered through gates from the 1700’s, visited the Berlin Wall, and biked next to ancient rivers, but the city itself was vibrant. The dark history of Berlin is still fairly recent, but the shadow of its Nazi and Communist past doesn’t overwhelm the present. 

Our highlights: the intriguing Holocaust memorial, done in a modern style to evoke emotions through giant cement blocks arranged in unconventional patterns and in a massive format rather than a traditional museum display, the fabulous FREE walking tours of Berlin (if you are ever in Europe, do the New Europe Tours. You won’t regret it…), and biking through the city. Until Sarah broke a bike, and then as we limped it through a park, we witnessed a robber carrying away piles of stolen bags from a car, got flipped off by the robber, and had to drag the bikes up and down the S-train steps. It put a slight, but only temporary damper on our love for Berlin.

We could have easily spent weeks in Berlin rather than just a few days, but it was memorable in so many ways. A quote that will stay with me came from a Jewish writer, inscribed in the floor at a place called Babelplatz where over 20,000 books were burned by the Nazis in 1933:

This is just the start. A war that begins with burning books ends with burning bodies.

It’s an astute observation, but made especially interesting because it was written in 1820, 133 years before the book burnings in Babelplatz…