Day 22

We woke up early today to board the coach and head for Berlin. On the way, we made a stop in Dresden, where we admired the architecture and had a yummy lunch. In contrast to most of the other cities we have visited on our tour, the cathedrals and all other buildings were completed in the 80s. We were reminded that as WWII was winding down, the Allies made the ‘questionable’ decision to bomb Dresden, thus destroying almost everything inside. The rebuilding efforts were finally finished around 1980. We had enough time in Dresden to stroll through the main cathedral after lunch, which was noticeably new and different from all the cathedrals we have seen thus far. We then hopped back on the coach to finish the last leg of our journey to Berlin. Before going to the hotel we stopped at the longest strip of the Berlin Wall that is still standing today. We took some great pictures, and if you ever go there you should look for the ‘MM + AH’ that we wrote on the wall! After arriving at our hotel, we set our bags down and got ready for dinner and another walking/pub-crawl tour. Our walking tour, ‘Eye Spy Berlin’, took us around all the memorable sites of the Berlin Wall as well as memorials dedicated to escape attempts from East to West Berlin. We also saw a large portion of the ‘Death Strip’ on this tour, which is the gap between the two parallel walls that was patrolled with dogs and soldiers at all times. We couldn’t believe that all of the stories we heard about citizens being gunned down there, and families escaping through tunnels, had all occurred only 50 years ago. After the walking tour, the local guide took us to a few bars where we took advantage of bargain-priced beer and free jager-bombs. We once again had the opportunity to shake our bon-bons (as if we haven’t done that enough yet..!) before taxiing our way back to the hotel.