Berlin day 1

Today started slowly.    We enjoyed breakfast and then went to buy a discount card for transport and activities. There were long queues, so we spent ages, longer than if we had stayed in the first queue , following scant directions to  slmewhere else and waited jn another queue. We were told we had to validate it before we could use it. That meant , for us, getting onto the first tram that came along, putting our card into the machine, and getting off at the next 
stop and walking back to where we started from.

An interjection.  Bloggers instructions are now appearing to me in German. IF I tell my tablet to translate into English,  I get a little box obscuring my typing asking if I want to add to the German translation,  or some such thing. Very annoying. Hence more unfixed errors.

After our discard card was validated we then used it to get a reduction on a 2 hour city bus tour. It was an excellent introduction to the city. The commentary was provided, through a recording into our earphones, of 2 old codgers one from the west and one from the east providing info and reminiscing.  We were impressed by the modern buildings in between old, or rebuilt 'old' , the large expanses of green parks or wide tree lined streets.

After lunch we came back to our hotel for a while, for the tour guide to get organised and come up with a rough plan for the next 4 days, and for the German scholar to look up some more useful words. We wandered off again to look at some things in our area , quite central, old East. We looked at a church,  wandered along the river bank . There was a building site behind some barriers and on the barriers were pictures of an exhibition of the best photos from 125 years of national geographic photos. They were brilliant. We enjoyed them.  Our destination was Nikolaiviertel, the site of the city medieval core which was razed in 1944 and rebuilt in the 80s by the GDR.  Our book says it is touristy and a bit tacky but with some reasonable cafes serving authentic german food. The only shop i saw sold upmarket german dresses. It was not as touristy as we thought it might be, we found a cafe in a secluded courtyard with a lovely view of an old church, we had some nice wine , a glass of a different german reisling and a glass of silvaner,  a dry white , we had some nice food, my friend the German scholar talked to the waiters in patchy German, and we finished off with apfelkuchen mit streusel. A lovely evening.