Berlin - Tours, etc.

We've been on three tours. The first day we went on a city tour which was awesome. Mostly because we had the best tour guide ever.....Machine Gun Mike from New Zealand. He has several degrees in history and is married to a woman that lived in the former East. His father-in-law was jailed for being in the Stassi and his mother-in-law pines for the days of socialism. He brought an understanding to the human side of what Berlin has been through.

We drove a Trabi car for an hour which was like an E ticket ride. And then today we went on a tour to Potsdam and the summer palace of Frederick the Great.

Potsdam is in the East and you can see the old, gray, and delapidated homes that have yet to the renovated next to the lovely "newer" homes. And all this is very recent since the wall just went down in 1989.

After we got dropped off from bus tour to Potsdam, we walked around the area, found a soup place and a toilet (we have a great technique to using toilets for free), and then walked over 4 miles back to the hotel. We did walk through the bad part of town....through the hookers (it's legal in Germany)...I guess that's part of the tourist experience.