The Hotel has an agreement with Cafe Mondo around the corner to provide breakfast so we wandered downstairs (5 floors in the elevator) and found the place and got bagels with cream cheese and coffee/tea. The cream cheese was more like goat cheese without flavor but it did have a stack of veggies on it. Very not American bagels.
Deb set up a walking tour from the Brandenburg Gate for 10 am so we walked the 47 minutes to Brandenburg Gate and got there 15 minutes early.
Let's talk about toilets. There are way too few toilets in Germany for travelers (aka tourists). And if you find one they charge anywhere from 0.50 to 1.5 Euros to pee. This probably keeps the rif-raf out but what a pain. So of course we needed to pee after walking all the way here after our morning coffee/tea, so the advice we got from the walking tour leader guy (Jimmy) was to look confident and walk into the ritzy hotel where Michael Jackson hung his baby over the balcony and use the toilet downstairs from the lobby. We of course chose to buy a sacrificial cup of tea at Starbucks next to the ritzy hotel and used the most disgusting bathrooms we have seen on the trip. Should have moonwalked our asses to the hotel, just saying.
Jimmy is an unemployed European history graduate (aka tour guide) and he did a spectacular job. The focus was the world wars because, as we learned, everything we have ever heard about as far as Nazis go, happened right here, right in front of us. The Reichstag fire, Hitler’s bunker, the Russian army taking down Berlin from the Nazis, Brandenberg Gate, the Berlin Wall. It is all here within a few blocks Jimmy took us on a great 2 hour walking tour.
After the tour we found a kabob place where they slice off garlic spiced beef from a huge hanging beef cow hanging in the window (okay, a quarter of a cow) and then we walked back to Brandenburg Gate and found the tourist info center there where we bought 2- day tickets to all the transportation in town. And it will get us to the airport outside of town on Tuesday when we leave.
We took the metro back to our apartment and decided to take this new found transportation system to the Museum Berlin - Karlshorst. We took the metro, and the metro again, to a bus to the museum. Wow, this public transportation works great!
And the museum was great. This museum is where they actually signed the Nazi surrender over. The UK, US, Nazis and Soviets were there with their pens. What this museum drove home were the atrocities the Nazis did early in the war toward the Soviets and Jews. They just shot anyone they did not think looked Aryan enough. Millions of people were murdered because some nutjob (Hitler) talked them into it. Lots of people died before the US even got into the war. Very heavy but very important.
Then good old Google Maps got us back near home and we stopped for a beer (and tea) before heading home. A flamkuchen (kind of a German version of flatbread pizza) went by that looked great so we decided to eat dinner there. Nice leisurely pub to spend the evening at. Then back to the hotel to do laundry and sleep.
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