Berlin was really cool, there seems like there is more construction there than here, literally every block is under construction I think i heard somone like Rick steves etc say its hard to keep an up to date guide book there because things are changing so frequently.
This was the only place we did a hop on hop off tour, as the one we went with, Yellow Bus tours, had 2 seperate large loops, one hits the main sites like Reichstag, museum island, etc. the second loop is mostly residential and ends near the east side gallery which is a cool spot.
Berlin is BIG obviously, but it's manageable and Tiergarten is a cool park to just relax and have a picnic or somthing, feels like youre actually out of the city
Checkpoint charlie was an even bigger joke than i expected it to be, gotta go there i guess and it's very close to the Topography of Terror so you might as well, but The black guy on the bike pulled up blasting like regae and rap and was handing out beers to people as the "soldiers" were dancing around and grinding on peeps for pics? lol
We were lucky to catch the Berlin Philharmonik performance as tickets were still available i purchased prior to going when almost every other show was sold out. The building for the philharmonik is purpose built and as such has amazing acoustics.
I've seen tonnes of plays, VSO shows, etc. and i've gotta say, this was probably one of, if not the best musical performance i've ever seen ,it was -insane!-
We were going to use Car2Go and rent a car for a few hours and drive to Sacsenhausen concentration camp but the app wasnt working for me so we took an uber to an outer train station and took the S1 all the way to the town where it's located. In hindsight you can take this train straight from Posterdamplatz takes about 50 minutes. Then it's a 20 minute walk to the camp.
I consider myself a fairly big war buff especially WW2 but it was definately a trip going here. This camp is relatively unknown but was one of the first of its kind and one Himmler had designed to be a model for others (Turned out the triangle design sucks for expansion so it wasnt widely adopted)
This camp was mainly for political prisoners and direct threats to the regime as well as Jews and other minorities, i think they said it was about 50,000ppl murdered here. The HQ controlling all concentration camps was also located here.
This is a plaque in the town on the way to the camp, it seems to be outlining the "death march" prisoners were forced to walk while the allies were approaching in order to clear the camp.
Soviet monument honoring the liberation of the camp, a bit of controversy as the orange stars used on the monument were only worn by political prisoners and POW's not jews, minorities, etc.
"Work sets you free"