Snackpoint Charlie

I’d like to start this post by mentioning that Bill would like to answer any and all questions you may have about anything. Not just this trip, but anything. He’ll address them in his own posts along the way. So if you have any questions, about science, music, his childhood, just leave a comment and he’ll get back to you. Seriously.

So Berlin. Berlin is such a beautiful city. We were there for about 3 days, and it wasn’t nearly enough time to see the whole city, but we tried.

Our first day there we did a little walking tour of our own through Museumsinsel, which is sort of an island with a few museums and the Berliner Dom on it. We actually walked up a few hundred steps to get to the top of the dome which had a great view of the city. Totally worth all those stairs, but I wouldn’t have turned down an escalator. You’d think they would’’ve updated those old churches with them by now...

We kept on through a park in the middle of the city, really peaceful and calm - I guess every big city needs something like that. We ended up on Kurfurstadam, which is a long street modeled on the Champs Elysses (sp?) in Paris. It’s a great spot for people watching and beer drinking.

The next day it was dreary and rainy, so we decided to take a double-decker bus tour around the city. It was a cool tour and I’m not at all embarassed that I was “that guy” that takes the tourist bus. We picked it up at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the spot in the Berlin Wall where American soldiers had a checkpoint. It’s set up really well, with a wall talking about the history of the Berlin Wall and all the things that have happened since it went up in the 60’s. Keeping the whole area classy was an adjacent line of stores called “Snackpoint Charlie.” Nice.

The tour took us all over Berlin, past lots of things we hadn’t seen the day before and can’t remember the name of today. It was really beautiful though; it’s a huge city and there is such a neat mix of old and new architecture throughout. I think the next time I summer in Europe I’ll leave a little more time for Berlin...