My first time to Berlin consisted of a whirl-wind tour of the sights in Berlin Mitte - the central district, that sits on the former border between Eastern and Western Germany.
I saw Checkpoint Charlie from the Western Berlin side at night, where the face of a young American soldier stands on guard; and the next morning in daylight from the former East German side of the border, where a young Russian soldier's portrait is immortalized. Strange to freely walk across what was a fiercely dangerous border zone from 1961 through 1989, and where many lives were lost in the pursuit of living a free life.
We ate at Gugelhof, where Albright, Clinton and Schroeder ate together, several administrations ago.
The Holocaust memorial was very impressive, with scores of individual concrete pillars of varying heights are arranged in rows and columns. The pathways in between varied in their depth and are designed to take you into the monument, and make the experience a little uncomfortable as you walk among the gravestone-like monuments.
Steeped in history, and deserving of a more leisurely time for exploration, I hope to return to Berlin soon.
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