Berlin day 3 - Trip day 10

This blog is for Saturday, 4/17/2010. We had two items on our agenda for today, the East Side Gallery and the Soviet War Memorial and Cemetery at Treptower Park.

The East Side Gallery is a remaining section of the Berlin Wall that is now used as an art gallery. In fact, it is protected by the police, and anyone caught damaging the wall will be prosecuted. The Gallery runs for about a half mile along the river front in south east Berlin. Depending on where you are starting from, it takes a few subway train changes to get there, but it is worth the trip. Here are some select pictures that we took. We will post the rest in our Facebook photo album later.

A French group were there and they were very friendly. He jumped into the picture with Pat :-)
His wife took the picture below for us.

The cars above are the East German car (Trabant, or Trabi for short). It was the most common car in East Germany. We have seen many on the road here. We have seen these two traveling around in a pack, advertising their agency.

After the Gallery we headed to the Soviet War Memorial at Treptower Park. Pat's dad visited this site back in the late '50's or early 60's and he told us how impressive it was. It turns out the memorial at Treptower is the largest Soviet memorial outside the Soviet Union. Over 7,000 of the 20,000 Soviet soldiers that died in the battle taking the city of Berlin are buried here. There is another large Soviet memorial in the Berlin Tiergarden, which we visited two years ago, that contains another 2,000 soviets soldiers. The Treptower memorial is in a park, and it about 1 kilometer from the metro station. So it is a nice walk to get there, following the signs.

The main statue in the park is an approximately 30 foot tall bronze statue, on top of a pedestal, which is on top of a raised hill, of a Russian soldier holding a child, with his sword lowered to the ground. (Like they carried swords...) And one of his feet is stepping on a crushed swastika. It is a pretty dramatic statue, but we think hardly the reality. As the Soviet troops were as ruthless in revenge to the Germans as the Germans were to the rest of Europe. Nonetheless, it is a great statue.

Plaques at the memorial entrance give a lot of detailed history of the memorial. There have been numerous ceremonies here with heads of state from Russia and Germany in attendance. In addition, a fact that I thought was very interesting, is that Germany has now accepted total responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of the Soviet memorials in Berlin. This is no small thing. The Treptower memorial needed total renovation in the early 2000's after 55 years of weather exposure.

Notice the DDR TV Tower in the background in the picture above. No matter where you go in Berlin, the DDR tower is your compass.

After we got back to the apartment and rested up for a while from all the walking, we decided to go and find a nice Italian restaurant that we visited two years ago. We walked about five block and it was right where we remembered it to be. We had a very nice Italian dinner with a bottle of Chianti, and some after dinner cordials and headed back to the apartment. What a nice day...