More strange weather followed the next day with us putting our jackets on and taking them off every ten minutes. We walked along Berlins premier street the Kurfuerstendam to KaDeWe or Kaufhaus des Westens an lovely old department store which has been upgraded to be quite modern inside with a large winter garden with glass roof on the top floor.
After a nice lunch at a non tourist little cafe a few streets away we walked to the Kathe Kollwitz museum. She was an artist and sculptress married to a doctor and they lived in a working class suburb in Berlin around the turn of the century. She was a humanitarian who depicted the lives of the working class people and portrayed the poverty and despair of the people in many of her works. She lost one of her two sons in the first world war and a grandson in the second world war. She worked for fifty years in Berlin and died at aged 78 two weeks before the end of the war.
Maurice had bought a new tablet in Stade and since the programmers decide to change things with every upgrade he had some questions so we went into a media markt in Alexander Platz in Berlin and had it sorted out.
The refurbished “Hamburger Bahnhof” was now a museum of modern art and was previously the main railway station. Maurice felt that he had seen enough of modern art so we went over to the former “East zone” and found our way to a bar called the “Macke Prinz” to see a friend of Maurice’s cousin Lulu however she was in England so we had a drink and then wandered around the interesting neighbourhood and found a bar serving Russian food.
The sky had cleared by the time we made our way back to Gatow and it felt odd to have our sunglasses on at 8.30pm.
A busy morning followed at the campsite, washing, drying clothes and sorting and cleaning the van again. Housework in the van takes about half an hour so it will be hard going back to cleaning a house in the future.
We took a bus back to the city at 4.30pm after having to change trains because a problem on the line, we got to the city about 6pm. It was a warm and sunny thirty degree day so we headed back to take some photos of the Brandenburg gate and then to the “Bundestag” to see where
Germany had it’s seat of government. A large glass dome had been added to the historic building and you could walk around inside it however it had been booked out weeks before so we just viewed it from the outside. There were many government buildings on the opposite bank of the canal. We walked from the Bundestag back to the railway station and then back to the campsite via train and bus.
We left Berlin for Rinteln near Hannover driving through Potsdam, another historic city before taking the backroads for the five hour trip to Rinteln which was about halfway to our final destination of Hoek van Holland.