European Trip 6

Above you see a large Pinochio-like marionette outside a toy store in Berlin. I thought Pinochio was an Italian thing, but we saw examples in Prague as well.

This small park was up the street from the Dom (Cathedral), which you can see in the right background. In the park were several memorials, including this one:

The photos burnished into the metal columns were pictures of people who challenged the authorities during the days prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are numerous such displays all over the city.

Here's another of those memorials, though I don't know what it commemorates. In the background is the old city hall, which sits alongside the Alexanderplatz (the center of "old" East Berlin).

More remnants from the Cold War era: statues of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. It's funny to see kids climbing on this, because back in the eighties, there was a story of a grad student I knew who visited and climbed aboard for a picture, only to be chased away by the East Berlin cops (they took their communism very seriously back then!).

Here's the tower in Alexanderplatz-- a landmark we were told to use to orient ourselves in case we got lost. This was intended as a monument to the old Soviet state, and is supposed to be the highest structure in Europe (there's a restaurant in the bubble), though it doesn't quite match the CN Tower in Toronto. All things considered, not really a very impressive structure aside from its height.