Tour guide in Berlin Jochen W.

Berlin - It's all about the Wall! The most unique part of Berlin's history is the story of the Berlin Wall. Start your private city tour with a visit to some of its remnants. You will see that this makes it a lot easier to understand the Berlin of today. Welcome to my town - Berlin. This year I realized that I already have spend more than the half of my life in Berlin. That means that I am getting old, but as well that I lived through all the changes of that amazing town since the reunification. But actually my Berlin story starts earlier. In the 80s me and my family often used the transit route through the GDR to drive to West-Berlin, because for us West-Germans this was the easiest way to visit the Eastern part of the city. It offered the rare opportunity to see that part of the family that had stayed in the East and was now obliged to continue to stay there. Rambling through East and West-Berlin as a teenager, I already began to sense what was special about this city. But I also sensed how the greyish shroud of the cold war paralyzed the dormant giant. Once the Wall was gone I decided to relocate to Berlin. So, from the early nineties onwards, I could witness the changes that the capital of the reunited Germany was undergoing. I had the first-hand experience of how Berlin was turning into that vibrant, cultural, vivid metropolis in the centre of Europe. And now it's already 20 years that I as a tourist guide have the pleasure to show my city to visitors from all over the world. The longer I live in Berlin, the more I learn to appreciate nature in the city. And there's plenty of it in Berlin. I'm particularly fascinated by the birdlife - and especially the birds of prey - in the city. In my free time, I often go stalking with binoculars and a birdsong app and always discover something new. I try to integrate this fascination into my tours as well. Step by step I try to promote more sustainable means of transportation like public transport and bicycles instead of fuel consuming luxurious big cars. Since currently tourism unfortunately still consumes a lot of natural resources, I try to compensate a part of it. I donate up to 10 percent of the price of my tours to local organizations whose goal is to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or prevent them from being created in the first place, such as restoration of peat lands, reforestation in urban areas, etc. • Certificate of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce Berlin: "Berlin Tourist Guide" • Licence to do guided tours in Sanssouci Park • Licence to do guided tours in "Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen" I do not have a license do to tours inside Charlottenburg Palace