Wanting to see something a little bit different we spent
the next two days using our travel passes to get us around the city on metro
trams and buses. At the Sunday morning
flea market in Schoneburg we poked into boxes of very personal items
offered for sale including photo albums, spectacles, shoes and Christmas
decorations. A little strange and moving in the shadow of the massive Rathaus
in the snow.
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| Schoneburg flea market |
We wandered around grand and musical Gendarmenmarkt
enjoying seeing Berliners at candlelit Sunday lunch in the expensive
restaurants and found ourselves a packed bake house in which to share pizza and
delicious pastries with hot milky coffee.
On Monday we headed into the East to see the 700 meters
of East Side Gallery of graffiti art on the Wall alongside the Spree.
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| East Side Gallery - 700m of wall art and graffiti |
In sections it had both second and third generation Walls
which showed a little of the scale of the architecture as the Wall was not just
a single structure but layers of built walls and trenches surmounted with
barbed wire and cameras. We were amused by the tags protesting against the
nearby O2 arena.
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| Two generations of the Berlin wall |
Whilst most visitors pointed their cameras at themselves
alongside the art, we looked in the opposite direction at the
destruction and construction of the East side.
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| Rebuilding Berlin |
