Wanderful Berlin

Berlin: What a wanderful place to start our journey. Where the streets are clean, and perfectly ordered, and traffic runs as smoothly as a summers tune! Cars, busses, and pedestrians work harmoniously together: an orchestra! And each instrument knows exactly where its entrance must be made. Bicycles zip along neat paths of coloured bricks, warning those in their way with the frantic "tring! tring-tring!" of those classic tin bells. Heaven forbid you're a student from South Africa where bicycle lanes are only in their infancy, and you find yourself in the way of a determined cyclist! People in Berlin also have the most beautiful dress sense! Usually they keep to themselves, minding their own business and going their own way. But every now and then, you spot one of those well-dressed folk. They're beautifully groomed, with pearly smiles, and auras radiating calm and peace as they sit around a cafe table, laughing together with their equally attractive friends. They all look as though they must have loved dressing themselves that morning.
The buildings of Berlin are old and intricately fascinating! Balconies scale their walls and create bright, oil paintings as the flowers fringeing the railing spill colour into the air. Above doors and windows, statues dressed in puffed sleeves and breeches peer down at the people below. They smile as we pass...and I smile back, wondering what stories they might have to tell...
Beyond the borders of Potsdamer Platz, where we stayed at the B&B hotel, history tells more of its own story, in the streets and remnants left behind. Remaining pieces of the Berlin wall create a stippled line along the walkways, passing rudely through streets and interrupting the flow of life. Although it's only a ghost that still remains, the tears, panic and desperation of those long ago people are absorbed into and live in the concrete and grass that surround those memorial grounds. Another survivor of war stands strong and proud in the Breitscheidplatz: the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. A victim to the bombing raids of 1943, the church exits in almost its original condition, with part of its roof missing, and bullet holes dimple the outer walls. But inside, angels still soar in patterns of gold and blue. A long crack crosses the tiled underside of the roof, and tries to tear the church in apart. It passes across the face of Jesus... and although He is broken, and slightly disfigured, the strength of His presence remains for those who continue to need it.

Saddening to think of all those who scaled this wall
only never to make it to the other side 

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church:
bullet holes, and broken roof

It was touching to see that even though
their church was broken, it never tore them apart

There he is...my silent spying friend

Inside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church with
the Angels