Quite the Valentine's Day (Start from bottom of post -up)

I was explaining thermodynamics. Only to be rudely interrupted by the flash. School the next morning started at 8am despite our efforts to prolong the night. Happy Valentine's Day Lovaaahs! Don't go to the Welshly Arms Hotel! (See youtube will ferrel SNL skit)
Coffee- french pressed, after salad, soup and Erste Liebe Eis (First Love Ice Cream). The food was themed: All veggies were cut into hearts. All sauces were "passion" or "love" and the ice cream well ya you get it.
But this is what happens when I let women into my kitchen. But if they cook I'll clean.
The lovely ladies cooking a romantic vegetarian dinner and me using my height to get the perfect angle -artistic of course-
Slight Change of Direction. So the bike tour is now over and I come home to a Valentine's dinner! I thought it was an appropriate pose. Valentine's day is just catching on here in Germany. Heinke's husband, Luthgar was not to pleased about this. Nontheless they were glad to hear we were fulfilling an american stereotype and we were happy they were ok with us celebrating.
Panke River through Walter-Nikolitz Promenade. Most beautiful part of Berlin and as Heinke my Gastgeberin says "Berlin ist nicht schoen, trotzdem sehr interessant!" And she's right. Berlin for the most part is an ugly city but even the ugliest of kids are loved!
Another stop on the bike tour- Pankow is a sector of Berlin in the northeast and the Panke is a river that runs through it... (good movie) We followed the Panke through the most foresty part of Berlin. It was very calm and quiet and very pretty.
Funny eh?
This is also a contemporary art project. Called Taschehaeusern (Pocket houses). Someone that owns this property, instead of rebuilding a house here, decided to pay an artist to make a fake house out of mosaic tiles. Odd- Though inspired some tief thinking.
This was my favorite part of the tour. Check out the fernsehturm im Hintergrund! They posed again thinking I was taking a picture of them. Silly superficial middle Easterners!
Cool huh!?

This is where one of the most famous photographs of the DDR/Berliner Mauer was taken. This is where the DDR Grenzsoldat springt ueber den Stacheldraht!
FREIHEIT, GLEICHHEIT, BRUEDERLICHKEIT! How ideal!
Wall- and small European Autos. Don't know how one could feel manly in those things...
Here's a great representation of the wall, the Dead Zone, and the patrol path as a whole. Yikes.
...Because we had Mathias with us. German Actor, Historian, Artist Extraordinare! That's the wall again.
Guck' mal! Those bricks are the old wall outline. You can follow it all over the city... which is what we were doing. This is an information post. Ya just press a button and get a history lesson. We didn't push the button because...
This is a contemporary art project. That's a rabbit. Supposedly rabbits were the only thing that was allowed to live in the Dead Zone. They were supposedly all over the place.
This is Chauseestrasse in Berlin Mitte. This is a distinct sepration between east and west. But it was extremely hard the whole bike trip to tell what exactly was former east and what was former west. The wall takes so many odd turns and ... turns? Funny thing is that the Berlin Wall was simply built on the old City Wall during the Kaiser Empire. The old city wall was used as protection and military strategy; it was a perfect fit I guess. Also the lamp posts here are the same exact lamp posts that lit up the Dead Zone and Wall area during the DDR. Handy and efficient; very German!
This is a Watch Tower that remains as a memorial for a man that was shot to death while trying to swim across the Spree from east to west Berlin. His attempt occurred 5 days after the Wall was erected. Supposedly around 140 persons died during the era of the Berlin Wall. Though Mathias says this statistic is absolutely skewed and inaccurate because if the shooting or capture of a border crosser was not completely obvious -heard or seen by the masses- then it was nt reported on the news or newspapers. This would have been bad coverage. Another interesting thing is that all soldiers patrolling the Wall worked in pairs, that were changed from day to day. With such an often exchange, one didn't get to know the other soldier and talk about how ridiculous the wall really was.
This is a patrol road. It remains as a bike path/walking-jogging path that served once as a road for soldiers driving specific military vehicles patrolling for border crossers.
These are some of the Afghani kids posing for GQ. This is an actual part of the Berliner Mauer. They painted the Wall white so that it was easier to see if anyone was attempting to cross over from east to west. Here we are standing in what was called the Dead Zone (Todesstreife). Obviously meaning, that anyone caught here would have been shot.
Berliner Mauer 1961 - 1989. Quite the career huh? What is really great is that after this bike tour I went to a lecture about Geteilte Berlin (Berlin as East and West). So after three hours of riding around in the Berlin cold, seeing, touching, following the physical outline of the former Wall, I was able to get the academics and politics that added to the history lesson on the bike tour. I want to type out some of the lecture but maybe another time haha. I will however say that I was very surprised at how much support east Berlin received from the Soviet Union, Stalin and Khrushchev. What an interesting- though scary- interaction of world power!
This is part of some government/administration buildings. In the background is one of the three Bridges that connects the former east and west parts of the city. These parts of Berlin were formerly separated by the notorious Berliner Mauer (Wall). This bridge project is a part of the intention to reunite (Wiedervereinigung say that ten times fast) symbolically and physically a formerly separated- physically and symbolically- Berlin. Less academic are the guys falling off their bikes in the foreground of the picture; some of them didn't have prior experience with bicycles. This turned out to be dangerous later...
Sweet naa!? Tscha, that's the Spree directly behind me, and then in the distance is the German Parlament, one can see the Kuppel and if ya look closely enough probably the peeps climbing up it too!
This is a picture of Friedrichstrasse and some of the buildings around the neighborhood. Graffiti is a common occurrence.
This is the group of guys that went on the tour; there are some more in the back ground practicing riding their bikes before the actual start of the Berliner Mauer Tour! One of the guys is Brazilian, one Afghani, and the guy in the background is from Paraguay. The bike rental was located on Friedrichstrasse, one of the main strips of Berlin.