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Monday, September 19, 2016

Berlin

Near our hotel was the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Memorial Church), bombed and never rebuilt after World War II, but left a memorial which can be visited (although we did not):

The subway, part of the U-Bahn system, was started in 1902 and some stations are beautifully decorated, like this tile one:


Nice manhole covers, too:


Our Deutsche-mark tour of Berlin, covered the former Olympic Stadium, where I was amused to see a street name Jesse Owens Strasse.  He was a four-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1936 games and one of two winners whose hand Hitler refused to shake (the other being Pasadenan Mack Robinson, Jackie's older brother, silver medalist in the 200-meter event); of course, they were rather an affront to the idea of Aryan superiority...

Rathaus Schöneberg, town hall for West Berlin, is best known to Americans as the site where John F. Kennedy gave his 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, commemorated with plaques and a replica Liberty Bell:









Why don't we have mailboxes like this anymore?

The former 1923 Tempelhof Airport is being re-envisioned as a public park, but some of the iconic buildings are still there and will probably remain:




Berlin has many beautiful churches, but unfortunately, we tended to see them from the bus windows:



Then, over to the Spree River and the site of the former Berlin Wall:


A good deal of artistic effort, much of it gleefully subversive, has gone into decorating the remains of the Berlin Wall:





Across the road is one of the more anodyne Berlin bears:


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