What a fascinating city - Berlin. We stayed at the Marriot Hotel which is only a 5 minute walk from the Kollhoff-Building. Our main aim was to see how has Berlin changed after 'the wall' fell if at all. Let me put it this way - I fell in love with Berlin. Reasons, well - it has become so cosmopolitan. Signs of that is mainly in Potsdamer Platz which is the business (city) district. There were hardly any old buildings left (probably flattened during the 2nd world war) so you see mainly new glass sky skrapers everywhere. If you look closely or rather on the floor at your feet there is long line marking where the wall was throughout the whole city - where it started and where it ends. The irony of it was it appeared that half of our hotel was originally in the West and the other half in the East. Strange as it may seem but we found out that the split of East and West was not actually a direction of East and West but more the indication that the West meant belonging to USA and East - the Russian side. A few meters away from our hotel was a small portion of what is left of 'The Wall' with grafitti drawn on it which had strong politican connotations (still left there as a reminder to us all). That felt rather eerie. Although the whole city is trying hard to rebuild and struggling slightly by the looks of it probably due to lack of funding there is a hint of a need to hide their past... We took to the city tour and there was no mention of the war. It was as if they are ashamed of it. My husband and I went to Albert Strasse (the old Gestapo HQ) which is flattened but there are pictures and explanations wrtten on the walls (all open air as the building no longer exists but the site is still preserved), of victims/prisoners and what happened there (by the way you will need at least 5hrs if you read through them all). Naively we asked where is the site of Hitler's last 'resting place' which they refused to even acknowledge... So we had to track the place ourselves and I believe we found it... a non-descript empty space that had been demolised and filled over. Anyway back to modern time look for an Australian bar in Potsdamer Platz which advertises 'Happy Hour'. The happy hour starts at 7pm and finishes at 2am. The first time we noticed it was on our walk back from the U-Bahn station (underground trains) multi-coloured neon lights flashing with English words... Like moths to light we headed straight for it at 9pm. A shriek of delight upon reading the cocktail menu (which had about 150 different types of cocktails) mainly priced between £2.50 - £5 per drink. Hooray!!! we thought what a good end to the night and only 5minutes stagger to our hotel. 5hrs later we staggered past the Sony Building and the Kolhoff Building - completely empty streets - to our hotel. Happy Days!!! The next morning nurse a hang over at Dunkin Donuts with you know what and lovely hot cup of coffee and that did the trick. Berlin really is very hip but we did not have much time to do everything we wanted to do... so we are heading back there again. It is a must go place for everything, e.g. countryside, shows (by the way whilst we were The Blue Men Group were performing), culture, history, food (German pubs are excellent) and the Steins are lovely.

Lying in a walking distance from the Brandenburger Tor and the Holocaust memorial, Potsdamer Platz is a great place to visit. It is an amazing and a quite unique mixture of history with modernity, which offers a lot of possibilities how to spend a couple of hours. It is filled with small restaurants and coffee houses, which are a great place to absorb Berlin's atmosphere and take a short break from sightseeing, if you like shopping, there is a big mall that is guaranteed to satisfy even the pickiest and demanding shoppers and, of course, the Sony Center, a fascinating modern complex of shops, restaurants, movie theater, hotel rooms, offices, art galleries and etc.

After the wall came down in 1989 this part of Berlin was made out of nothing - it is totally new! So maybe the charm of a growing place or neighbor hood is missing but therefore it is interesting to see this new part work imagining it was not there 30 years ago...

place is good for weekends. places to eat are bit expensive, a movie screen which shows movies in english..............................................................................................................................................................

Potsdammer Platz is a great place. I have seen it before 1989 and now, what a huge difference. Germany tries to pump as much money as possible into the capitol, therefore you have some very nice part of the town. But I still can not fall in love with it.