Next on the Berlin tour is the Brandenburg gate, the famous marker between what used to be east and west Berlin. Then to the city’s oldest chocolate shop so that we can see the same gate replicated in chocolate and wafer biscuits ‘for our viewing pleasure.’

Outside the chocolate shop, which was in a 17th century limestone building, our guide points out the myriad of battle scars on the building’s surface (’The way to tell and original building in Berlin is if it has bullet holes in it’ There are more bullet holes per square inch in Berlin than in south LA’).

In fact our entire city tour revolved around the legacy of the WWII Allied bombing of Berlin: ‘This used to be the royal church…ah, this building used to be magnificent…oh, and this place was fabulous - til they were all reduced to rubble in the bombings’ (at this point our guide would stop to stare hard at all us Australian, American, Canadian, and British tourists taking his tour, in other words all of us who could conceivably be considered spawn of the Allies.)

But ‘Hi, I’m Kristian!’, as his name tag read, turned out to be an extremely informative and animated guide, providing us with a ten-minute summary of Germany’s entire history right down to the finest of detail (’Friedrich the Great always wore a red tunic in battle so that if he was wounded and bleeding his men would not notice and fear for him - much the same way Hitler always wore brown pants’), and pointing out the Canadian, French and American embassies - ‘Oh no wait, that’s just Starbucks.’

He even managed to not slap Amber from North Carolina when, at the very end of his extremely thorough historical spiel, she twisted her hair around one finger, snapped her gum with a resounding crack and asked ‘So why did the Nazis build the Berlin Wall again?’