Berlin

I've always pronounced this city name Ber-Lin...but Berliners call their city Bear-Lin. And there are cute teddy bears everywhere telling you you are in Bearlin!

We had a tour of the city catching the main points--the Brandenburg gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, and more. We did not see much that dates back to Hitler's Germany as most of that was destroyed during or right after World War II.

We visited the DDR Museum, a modern hands-on interactive museum where we got a good idea what life was like during the days of the "wall." we walked thru a Soviet era apartment--tiny comes to mind but if I could think of another word that means small, bleak, and dingy that would work too. We saw an "interrogation room" with one way glass, a very hard chair and an interviewer reading the same question time and again until it was answered right!

Most telling however was a map of Berlin. West Berlin was a tiny island of democracy and prosperity in a sea of East Berlin and East Germany. We heard about the isolation of West Berlin from the rest of Germany but until I saw the map, it was not clear!