Day 10 – Reichstag and Memories.

Today we have a day of wandering, armed with Tour Guide Mike's stories and knowledge. He very thoughtfully graffiti'd our map with an assortment of circles, acronyms and arrows to indicate places of interest that we really should see, but wouldn't on his tour. We deciphered the hieroglyphs, and recalling our newly gained geographic knowledge, decided to hit the Reichstag as a primary goal.

Marching down the Unter den Linden, we were stopped and asked for directions to a good restaurant. We had to laugh, as the question was asked in the vain hope that we were locals – see? A day here and already we've blended in! We're good. We sent them back the way we came, as we had seen eateries, value and quality being unknown.

The walk continued and took us past the main embassies. The british embassy is a modern design, with street blockades of silver vertical cylinders topped with bright red LED's. We saw a car approach, stop, and two of the cylinders retract into the ground to allow egress. Very slick! In contrast, the current American embassy has a 100ft danger zone surrounding it, with concrete emplacements, armed guards patrolling and checkpoint booths. I can't quite convey the feeling this evokes, but it's a mixture of sadness, irritation and being slightly bemused. They are so paranoid of terrorist attacks, they are exuding aggression in all directions. It's disappointing.

We reach the Reichstag, and are glad to find the oft-murmured tales of day-long queues are not true at this particular time. We do have to line up, but the line moves fairly fast, the doors opening and accepting approximately 30 people at a time. When the queue moves up sufficiently to allow us in, we see that there's an airlock setup, followed by a rather rigorous security check. The gruff german guard is directing people to put jackets, bags, etc on his x-ray conveyor, and not understanding a word of it, I watch closely to see what other people to, so as to be able to follow his instructions, language barrier withstanding. He must have overheard J, D and I talking, and switches to fluent english – these guys are good! We pass the muster, and head for a large lift, which takes the 30 of us directly to the top of the Reichstag.

The Reichstag was suspiciously burnt to the ground just after Hitler gained the power as Chancellor and just before Parliament could elect a new majority, and remained in a state of ruin for a long, long time. After the politics and breakdown of Berlin was resolved, the Reichstag was reinstated as the house of parliament, and a new glass and steel dome has been built to replace the original domed ceiling. A walkway corkscrews up through the dome to a viewing deck at the top, allowing panoramic views of the city. To be blunt, a lot of the view is quite unspectacular: roofs of buildings, grey smoke-stacks, lots of boring looking industrial emplacements. This is quite mundane, until you think about what this view represents – 17 years ago, a lot of this area was poorly built, and a great deal of what can be seen just wasn't there. Thinking in this frame of mind throws the view into perspective, and makes me appreciate it a whole lot more: I'm not just looking at Berlin, I'm looking at Berlin that wasn't here less than two decades ago. After walking the rooftop, braving the freezing rain and taking photos, we head back down the super-lifts.

From here, we're on the out-skirts of West Berlin, to our right is the new Government Quarter (shiny buildings of square and circle designs), and to the left is the Tiergarten. We decide to head left, and walk through a section of the garten as we head back towards the Brandenburger Tor. Something I noticed on the train ride into Berlin from their airport was the extremely common tall leafless trees. Tour Guide Mike had told us these trees were Linden trees, and that they are everywhere – he's right, they truly are everywhere. We stop at a Wurst stand, and eat some genuine german wursts (one wurst, many wurst?), which are truly some of the most delicious sausages I've ever had. The walk continues past the Tor, and takes us the grey expanse that is the Jewish Memorial.

Lining up, we are met by a multi-lingual guide (I love these people, yet am simultaneously hideously jealous) who informs us of a 15 minute wait, and a security check. The Memorial is a lot more than meets the eye – above ground it is the symbolic city of grey blocks, and all that may be represented by this, yet below ground is a startlingly in-depth Memorial that adds gravity and stark realism to what happened. A quote that Mike used was that “a death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic” is fairly true – we cannot truly comprehend the horror and wickedness of such an act, as it's too enormous. The Memorial has stories of individuals who died during the Nazi regime, telling of their lives before, during and ultimately their ends. There are displays dedicated to families, again telling of their lives and the events they suffered, and ultimately where they are now, or how they died during the war. The atrocity is astounding. An organisation based in Israel is trying to gather a list of all those who died during this time, as records are incomplete, and entire families disappeared – Hitler's evil goals were almost achieved in some areas.

We leave the Memorial in a sober state, a much greater understanding of just how important this Memorial is, and what it represents. Now knowing this part of Berlin quite well, we guide ourselves back to Hackse Markt, and find a fantastic Turkish restaurant, it's décor a mish-mash of various mediterreanean styles (we spot greek plates on the walls), before retiring for the night to plan tomorrow's journey – that's right, off again!

New Thing Learnt Today – "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana