Going on a Viking cruise with stop to Berlin, train ride to Berlin and back, looking for a local guide to show us the highlights in the time we have there. Any Rick Steves local guides to do this?
Is this some sort of river cruise or is it an ocean cruise docking at a Baltic Sea port? If the latter: This topic has come up before, and the usual recommendation is not to try for Berlin because such a large amount of your time will involve sitting on a bus. There are good options much closer to the Baltic ports.
I loved the six days I spent in Berlin back in 2015 and look forward to returning. However, a lot of what is special about Berlin is the historical sights and the great museums. Those are not places to be appreciated as you drive by. Berlin itself doesn't have a lot of beautiful, old architecture as you can find in some other German cities.
If this is a Baltic cruise, there are several guides who will arrange transportation to Berlin and back to the ship and provide six hours or so (depending on the ship's schedule) of seeing the sights of Berlin with a vehicle and guide. In fact, if you have a group of three or four (and you can go on the Cruise Critic roll-call forum for your cruise looking for fellow passengers looking to join in), this is the way to go. Jeremy Minsberg and Heidi Leyton are among the guides who for years have offered this service.
But some areas of Berlin were so much destroyed that they needed to be
rebuilt completely. Tragic example was Hansaviertel which had a
demolition ratio of 95%, so Berlin Senate decided to give nearly whole
area free to an architect competition: the Interbau 1957.
I did an architecture tour several years ago through Context Travel that compared East German and West German post-WWII architecture -- the former Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) vs Hansaviertel. It was really cool to see the difference!
Thank you for the responses, we have found a Private tour with the Berlin story teller, Berlin sounds spread out and with the time to get from cruise port, we decided on a tour with car. Thank you!