Last day in Berlin

Up and out by 9am - special effort for the last day. Long tram & train journeys today, time for some reflections. The public transport is brilliant. No ticket barriers anywhere and apparently no-one checking tickets, which is surprising. More people smoking than in UK cities. Plenty of building going on. Vast majority of homes are large square blocks of flats, even in the suburbs. Generally the city is very low-rise.

Took the M8 and changed onto S7 at Springpfuhl onto Ostkreuz; this is a practice run for tomorrow because we can get airport express from Ostkreuz. Then RB12 to Oranienburg because the S1 has bus replacement, and the regional train is much faster. Today, to prove me wrong, we did have ticket checkers on the RB train, both ways.

The planned route to Orianenberg worked with no hitch at all. The bus from outside the station was crammed with fifty Italian teenagers, a good reason to wear our masks. The Sachsenhausen camp was a huge site, well ordered with exhibits and info in both German and English. 90% of the visitors were groups of under-25s - it seems like a good thing they learn about this. The site was overwhelming. Walking through the gates which declare 'Arbeit Macht Frei' was unsettling, but when you saw the size of the site, enclosed by walls punctuated by watchtowers, it was almost a physical shock. The details of how people were starved and murdered, and how the SS lived in plush comfort, were hard to take. Then from 1945-1950 it was a Soviet internment camp, not much better. Then the GDR made it into a 'victory over fascism' story, and only after reunification did it becone an honest memorial to its terrible history. After a couple of hours, it was difficult to absorb more. We didn't feel like taking any pictures there.

We had a hot chocolate in the cafe and caught a bus back to Orianenberg Station. Then train to Ostkreuz Station and thence to the Museum Island in the centre of Berlin via the U5. We debated which museum to go to, and in the end plumped for the huge ornate Cathedral as we didn't fancy Roman or Egyptian artefacts in the Altes Museum, which is an interesting building. We visited the cathedral cafe down by the Spree river and had perhaps our last calorie-rich cafe-kuchen of the trip. 

The cathedral was seriously impressive, both inside and out.

We climbed, slowly and carefully, the 270 steps to the Dome's outer edge, where we got a clear bird's eye view of much of central Berlin.

After the careful descent to ground level, we decided to head for home, via a supermarket to buy pizza to heat up in the small kitchen of the apartment, to go with the last of the fizz. After polishing off our remaining bits of food and making sandwiches for tomorrow (of course - we're British and always have sandwiches), we packed and had a relatively early night.