At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

This one of the more amusing panels you will see at the Berlin Wall East Side Gallery. It is a reproduction of a Berlin Wall graffiti painting titled “My God, help me to survive this deadly love” that depicts an actual kiss that took place between Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich [...]

This is the lower level of the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station in Berlin. I visited this train station in December 2009, when my family and I were taking a train from Berlin to Prague as part of our Central Europe itinerary. Although it may not seem like it from the photo, the train [...]

Currently home to the German Bundestag, the Reichstag building has played a major role in Germany’s tumultuous 20th-century history. Construction of the building was completed in 1894 and it housed Germany’s parliament until 1933, when it caught fire. The fire was blamed on Communists, and Hitler used the fire as an excuse to suspend civil [...]

This is a copy of the famous sign that once stood at Checkpoint Charlie, a border crossing between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The checkpoint remained in use until October 1990, when Germany was reunified. Checkpoint Charlie remains a major tourist destination, however, and a replica of the Allied checkpoint guardhouse was [...]

During one of our family holidays to Europe we visited a Christmas market in Berlin and dined on sausage and beer in the freezing cold temperatures.

The German national dish . This was from a small fast food restaurant in Berlin and was absolutely delicious.

Along the banks of the River Spree runs a 1.3km long section of the wall that divided East and West Berlin for 28 years. This particular part of the wall, the longest stretch still standing, is now home to the East Side Gallery, which hosts over 100 paintings by artists from all over the world. [...]

Life recently released a set of never-before-published images of the Führerbunker taken shortly after the fall of Berlin. They are worth perusing if you have an interest in World War II history. I visited Berlin a few months ago, back in December 2009. Incredibly, this was my first visit to Germany. How foolish of me [...]

Photos from my family trip to Berlin, Prague, and Vienna on December 24, 2009 – January 3, 2010.