Berlin Fountains and other Berlin, Germany Warning Or Danger Tips

While Berlin has some of the most beautiful, meaningful and powerful monuments (from Bebelplatz monument to the Holocaust monument), it also has a collection of ugly, meaningless and empty fountains. They simply did not get it how to make a fountain in public square, and to make things worse - it seems that during the division of the city East and West were competing in who will make the ugliest water spray.

Sorry-looking Brunnen der Volkerfreundschaft (Friendship of the Peoples Fountain) on Alexanderplatz displays a series of spirally-placed plates that all share water spraying it around. Whether it is the ugliest fountain in Berlin is hard to say because its counterpart in front of Europa Center is nothing but a stone slab surrounded by a series of stairs sprayed with water. Oh, there are also some metal pieces in the stone that have no function but are simply put there to look more "beautiful". What is the meaning of metal pieces that look like child's legs that come out of the stone is hard to say.

All fountains seem to be a popular meeting points and they luckily all have stonewall around where you can easily sit while waiting, listening to the sound of water and the best thing - you don't have to look at the fountains.

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Former East Germany's politics was so problematic that it had troubles keeping their own citizens inside their territory. Then they came up with a fantastic idea of building a large wall that occupied half of Berlin in order to protect their system.

Fortunately, old GDR wall is history since 1989 but Berlin still has new walls that occupy whole blocks of buildings and close whole streets in order to protect certain systems. A large portion of Neustadtische Kirschstrasse around the building occupied by the Embassy of the USA is closed for traffic and with large anti-tanks barriers (they are affraid the GDR will raise from the ashes or what?). This all happens in the middle of Berlin, in one of side streets of the Unter den Linden boulevard. Like this is not enough, the European branch of the US decided to build their embassy nearby and also closed a large section of the Wilhelmstrasse - one of the main streets leading to Unter den Linden.

Why they have to do it we all know (see any of Michael Moore's movies). Why Berliners let them do it in the center of town is out of my capabilities of understanding.

(Oh yes, the nice plot next to Brandenburger Tor is reserved for the new US embassy. So please hurry up untill they close Pariser Platz leaving you with no opportunity to photograph Brandenburger Tor).

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Website: www.usembassy.de , www.britischebotschaft.de