Tuesday morning found all of us in the right place and on time as we left Jena to head to Berlin. The train arrived 10 minutes late in Jena, but delivered us 10 minutes early to Germany’s capital. We took public transport to our youth hostel and then headed back to the center of what had been West Berlin. There we got on a double-decker bus to get our first orientation to this large city. Many of the places we saw from the top of the bus, we got to revisit in more detail later on foot with jenakolleg’s Wolfgang B. After the bus tour, we walked up West Berlin’s famous shopping street Kurfürstendamm to the remains of a large church destroyed in a bombing raid near the end of World War II. Those ruins stand as a reminder of the effects of war. A modern chapel built next the ruins offers a peaceful refuge for meditation and worship next to the hustle and bustle of the commercial activity outside. Before supper we visited one of Berlin’s early 20th-century transportation hubs and the KaDeWe—continental Europe’s largest department store. After supper, we clambered onto a bus that took us through Berlin’s embassy quarter to Potsdamer Platz. During the Cold War, this was a desolate no-man’s land where Soviet, American and British sectors of Berlin met. After the opening of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, major architects repopulated the square with numerous new buildings. From here we walked along the route once divided by the Berlin Wall to the mute stones of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial and then to the Brandenburg Gate, whose location on the border between East and West allowed it to serve as an important symbol for both sides. We ended the day by visiting the dome of the Reichstag (the German parliament building). Symbolizing the goal of transparency in government, the dome offers visitors a view into the legislative chamber, as well as one of the best vantage points to look out on the city of Berlin.