Day 10

Today we were met by Matthias who came to our hotel to treat us to a day of non traditional sightseeing. Matthias was introduced via email to Nicki. It's another relationship too convoluted to try to explain. We expected we would spend maybe a couple of hours with him before he would be totally ready to dump the old ladies but he took us to all sorts of interesting places and dropped us off at around 5 PM after a really wonderful day.
First he took us to the East Side Mauer (German for wall) museum. This is the area of wall that was left for contemporary artists to paint. I actually posted a picture from this wall in the day 9 post but we didn't actually see it until Matthias took us there. Here's another picture from that wall:

From a photo of Leonid Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker when he visited East Berlin. Said to be an expression of fraternal (??!?) love to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of East Germany as a  Communist nation

We then drove through the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin to reach the Russian Memorial, a memorial to the lives of the Russians lost during the fight for Berlin during WW II. It is a mammoth memorial located in an area of a huge park. It's quite dramatic!

With Matthias at entrance to Russian monument

Soldier with sword standing on broken swastika

 After the visit to the memorial we went to a charming suburb of Potsdam with buildings that appeared in the old traditional German small town style. There was a market that we wandered through then we were off to lunch at a very local type roadside place frequented by motorcyclists. Great, casual place with good food. 

Joe and his brother in law George talked about the area of Berlin that they remembered in the area of the American troop base so Matthias took us to search it out. There is a museum at the site of the old base that has the original Checkpoint Charlie building and we went through museum looking at all the memorabilia.
We were able to find the address of the house that George and Joe remembered. It looks pretty modern...wonder if it was razed and a new building put up. The entire area is a very nice neighborhood.

Our next stop was the actual bridge that is in the movie "Bridge of Spies", a story based on a real exchange that took place on that bridge.....Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel.

It was late in the afternoon by then and Matthias drove us back to central Berlin and offered to drop us at KaDeWe, a HUGE Harrod's London type department store. It didn't take much time to make THAT decision......yay, shopping!! It was a great store with a gigantic food hall that we wandered through, made our way through the store doing a bit of shopping and went to the U bahn for our trip back to the hotel. 
There was probably dinner involved but I can't remember........