Berlin City Tour and Legoland Discovery Center

On our second day in Berlin we bought tickets for a hop-on / hop-off city bus tour.

Potsdamer Platz
The first place we got off the bus was Potsdamer Platz.  This part of Berlin is named after the city of Potsdam (25 km to the south west) because it marked the point where an old (think 1700s) road to Potsdam passed through Berlin's city wall (not the Berlin Wall -- that would come much later).  Initially Potsdamer Platz was just a minor intersection of rural thoroughfares; that began to change when the Potsdamer Bahnhof (train station) opened in 1835.

In 1871, Berlin became the capital of the new German Empire.  Positioned firmly in the center of a rapidly-growing metropolis (Berlin was the 4th-largest city in the world in 1900), Postdamer Platz became a place for hotels, department stores, theatres, dance halls, restaurants, and more.  By the 1920s, Potsdamer Platz was internationally known as the center of Berlin -- it had become the busiest traffic center in all of Europe and the heart of Berlin's nightlife (similar to Piccadilly Circus in London or Times Square in New York).

Unfortunately, proximity to government buildings meant that Potsdamer Platz was almost completely destroyed during the World War II bombing raids of Berlin.  After the war, the Berlin Wall divided Potsdamer Platz in two, creating a desolate wasteland in what had once been an economic center of Berlin.  This 1986 photo (borrowed from Wikipedia) shows No Man's Land between the Outer Wall (foreground) and Inner Wall (background) with East Berlin in the distance.

Since German reunification, Potsdamer Platz has been the site of major redevelopment projects and has again become an economic center of Berlin.  Seeing the luxurious Ritz-Carlton Hotel immediately adjacent to the former location of the Wall really underscored this point for me.

Also at Potsamer Platz: the European headquarters for Sony and the corporate headquarters for Deutsche Bahn (photo from Wikipedia).

We stopped for some photos at a section of the Wall that still exists in its original place.

My cousin Diane and her husband Jason and their son Ian were visiting Germany to buy a new BMW from the factory in Munich.  After picking up the car, they stayed with us for a few days and joined us on this trip to Berlin.

A double-brick line traces the former path of the Wall...

Legoland Discovery Center at Sony Center
After looking at the Wall, we walked to Sony Center (less than five minutes) to visit Legoland Discovery Center.  It was expensive (I would say overpriced but I'm not sure Tina shares this opinion) but the boys liked it.  Admission times are staggered throughout the day (you will not be admitted before the admission time printed on your ticket) but once you are in, you can stay until closing.  The catch is that you cannot leave and come back.  We had an 11AM admission time and the boys were hungry almost immediately.  If I had known about the no pass-out policy, we probably would have eaten first.  We could have purchased hot dogs from the on-site food service but we got the boys to hold out until 12:30-ish so we could find a nicer place to eat.

 

Do not underestimate the popularity of Dirk Nowitski...

We ate lunch at an Australian restaurant at Sony Center...

 ...and then hopped back on the bus.

Checkpoint Charlie
The next place we got off the bus was Checkpoint Charlie.  It was crowded.  We stopped at McDonald's to use the bathroom.  I would not have been able to write any of these sentences 25 years ago.

 The Checkpoint Charlie museum (we did not go inside) is across the street from McDonald's.

Photos from the bus
I do not know what these places are.  We saw them from the bus...

Brandenburg Gate
The next place we got off the bus was the Brandenburg Gate.

The bus drove us by the German Parliament building (Reichstag) but I didn't take a photo.  I think by then Sara was having a melt-down on the bus...

Who, me?

We rode the subway back to the apartment and started packing up our stuff for the next day's drive back to Wiesbaden.

Ampelmann
Berlin is famous for the cute little Ampelmännchen that adorn many of the pedestrian stoplights.  The Ampelmann store sells lots of Ampelmann trinkets.

I had been wanting to visit Berlin since moving to Germany and was not disappointed (except that we didn't stay longer).  I really liked it; maybe we will go back.  Tina had not been as enthusiastic about wanting to do this trip but commented afterward that she enjoyed it more than she thought she would.