Here and there but not quite everywhere!
We headed out in the morning to Versailles on the RER. The Château de Versailles is huge. We were easily able to spend the entire day there without seeing everything. We toured the interior of the main palace as well as two smaller buildings at the Estate of Trianon. We also walked through the extensive gardens behind the palace.
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We headed out in the morning to see the Château de Vincennes, at the eastern end of Metro line 1. After touring the chapel and castle keep, we had a quick lunch before heading back into Paris to visit the Panthéon. We then went to a nearby crêperie for an early dinner. We ended the day with a visit to Galeries Lafayette Haussmann, the largest department store in Europe.
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We spent most of the day in and around the Tiergarten, a large park on the west side of Berlin’s city center. We started out at the Brandenburger Tor, checked out the exterior of the Reichstag, and walked through part of the park. We saw various monuments and memorials and ultimately ended up at the southwest corner of the park by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
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Today, we mostly visited portions that remain of the Berlin Wall. While doing so, we also saw Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous crossing between East and West Berlin. And we spent some time at the Topography of Terror, a Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center) that covers the Nazis’ rise to power and the evils that they committed. There is also some special focus on this particular site as it is where the Gestapo headquarters was located.
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After taking the ICE to Berlin, we dropped off our bags at The Westin Grand and started to walk to the east on Unter den Linden (Under the Linden). We walked to the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) before backtracking by U-Bahn. We unexpectedly encountered Christopher Street Day, a large pride event that was going on today. We spent a little bit of time at the event before walking through the nearby Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. We then kept on walking to Potsdamer Platz where we saw our first Berlin Wall segments. We then took another brief U-Bahn ride followed by a short walk back to our hotel to end the day.
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