Day 8: June 19, 2023

A local guide showed us the highlights of midtown Berlin: the Worldclock on Alexanderplatz, the prestigious boulevard “Unter den Linden” with beautiful palaces, theatres, museums and villas, the restored Palace of the Prussian emperors and the Gendarmenmarkt with two identical churches and the concert house. We continued to Potsdamer Platz and saw the world’s first traffic light. For lunch we visited the breathtaking department store KaDeWe – “Kaufhaus des Westens” (Western Department Store). It was established to show Easteners the prosperity of the new west. On six floors you find everything you may be looking for, featuring the most extensive delicatessen shop in the world with more than 30 fine restaurants and bars, offering everything from fresh oysters to champagne. Some had their lunch here before we had time to explore the center of what was Western Berlin before the reunification. We saw the “Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche” (the church was bombed during WW2 but the people of Berlin decided they want to keep the ruins to remind the people from all over the world that such a war should never ever happen again). After some free time for shopping we took our dinner in a restaurant right on Kurfürstendamm.