Berlin, Journée 3

I woke up early(ish) and headed to Museum Island, to the Pergamon Museum! My tour guide had highly recommended it, so I decided to check it out. The Pergamon was a very different stop in Berlin for me because I mostly went to World War II and Cold War sites/museums. However, the Pergamon covers antiquity, Islamic Art, and the Middle East.

After buying your ticket, the first thing you see when you walk in is the front part of the huge Peragamon Altar, which was excavated in Turkey and then transported all the way to Berlin and reassembled inside the museum. It's really cool to walk up the stairs and see all the statues of gods and mythical creatures up close. It's crazy to think they moved the whole thing from Turkey!¹

The rest of the first part of the museum contains other reconstructed ruins from the Pergamon Altar. Even though I don't know much² about the history around it, I still enjoyed the exhibit.

Next, I saw the Ishtar Gate, which was built all the way back in 575 BC and used to guard the city of Babylon. Oh and it used to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World!³ This exhibit was a lot more colorful than the altar, and I loved the blues and golds. It was really cool to walk down the hall and look at all the mosaics on the walls of the gate.

Lastly, I went to the Islamic Art section, which was also amazing. The tiles and ceramic work are so intricate, it's incredible.

(Actually not sure which part this thing was in, but it's pretty.)

After reluctantly leaving the sweet, sweet air conditioning of the Pergamon, I took the train to the East Side Gallery, which is where a long stretch of the remaining Berlin Wall has been turned into a gallery of graffiti art. Artists from all around the world came to paint a section after the Berlin Wall fell, to symbolize change and a new freedom for the city. 

It was very hot and pretty crowded - I had to awkwardly stand and pretend to fiddle with my camera while I waited for people to pass by so I could take a picture of some of the art. Nonetheless, it was really cool to walk down the wall and see all the different graffiti paintings. They vary a lot, from crazy and colorful and fun, to overtly political, to dark and ominous, to bright and optimistic.

I also saw this cool bridge near the end of the East Side Gallery. There was a rock band playing inside.

Next, I visited the third part of the wall that is still standing. This part was cool because it's in an open grassy area instead of being right on a busy street. There are remnants of the wall and steel poles that show were the outer and inner walls and the death strip were. There's also a memorial to all the people who died trying to escape to the other side of the wall. Across the street, there's a small museum with a viewing platform, so you can take the stairs up and look down at what the walls and a guard tower would have looked like back during the Cold War.

Memorial to people who died trying to cross the wall

I think these represented the signal fence between the inner and outer walls.

Observation Tower

View of the death strip from the tower

Later, when I was walking back to the train station to go home for the night, I stopped to rest near the Brandenburg Gates, and all of a sudden, thousands of roller bladers went by! There were police escorts and music playing, like a big party. I saw a couple roller blading nights like that in France too, so apparently Europeans love roller blades! I couldn't believe how many people were participating, I was sitting there for like ten minutes watching them go by, so I took a video:

À bientôt!

1. Apparently, this is a little controversial nowadays.
2. Okay, anything.

3. I guess it got kicked out though. Burn.

Berlin Journée 2, Partie 2

So after resting a little after all that walking, I got a delicious cheese pretzel from a street vendor. Oh, Germany! You and your delicious pretzels!

This was conveniently right next to Berliner Dom. Even though it looks pretty old (at least to me), Berliner Dom was actually finished in 1905. So compared to a lot of famous European churches, it's practically brand new! Nevertheless, I was so taken with how it looked on the outside, that I wanted to see the inside too. When I found out it was 4€ to enter, I was a little annoyed because I don't think churches should charge admission, but it turned out that it also included walking around the dome at the top, so then I was okay with it.



The inside was so beautiful! Everything was really clean and gold and marble-y. The organ was playing a little too, which was pretty. One really cool thing was that you could go up to a balcony seating area and look down on the main floor of the church, which gave you such a pretty view of everything. In all the other churches I've been to, going up a level was either not an option or cost extra. But looking down on everything (or right at eye level with some of the statues and molding) really added to the experience.

Then, I took about a billion stairs up to the dome, where you could go out and walk around the whole thing, so you could see an incredibleee panorama of the whole city. Since it was right near closing time, I was practically the only one up there. It was really cool to look out and see all the Berlin landmarks I recognized.

Right as I was about to go down, a security guard came and told me and an older woman that we had to leave now anyways. She was a little slower going down the endless stairs,¹ so I lost track of them on the way down. Following the exit signs, I ended up in this creepy crypt underground, where there were a few lingering tourists and  a bunch of tombs for important dead people.

If I recall correctly, the Berliner Dom closed at 6 and the information center at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe closed around 8. So I headed over there to the sort of underground museum. I didn't take any photos, but the center was very interesting and solemn. There were stories and photos of Jewish families and what happened to each of the family members. There was also a room with letters people had written to their loved ones during the war. A lot of it is hard to read, but I'm glad I went.

So that was my second day in Berlin! À bientôt!

1. Some of them were pretty steep too! I wish they had had an elevator for her.

Berlin! Journée 2...

Let's be honest, one of the most magical things about Berlin was the abundance of Starbucks. Really, of almost all of the American food we California kids missed so much in Bordeaux. Starbucks, frozen yogurt, boba, Mexican food...  Anyways, I'm getting off track. But obviously the first thing I did was hop on over to a Starbucks and pick up an iced caramel macchiato to jump start my day.¹

And yet... an ulterior motive lurks beneath the surface. That's right... the real reason I was at Starbucks... was to take the free walking tour of Berlin! Duh, duh, duh! Oh, gracious! Ha, so this company offers free Berlin walking tours that cover all the big spots in Berlin. It's not totally free because you're supposed to tip your tour guide at the end (that's how they get paid), but it's still a good deal. The tour guide for my group was really informative and told some good France jokes (ha!). And it was a great way to see an overview of all the major sites and think about what I wanted to go back to later.

We passed about a dozen of these group beer bike things. Mostly very noisy,
very drunk bachelor and bachelorette parties haha. Good thing a guide does the steering.

We started at Pariserplatz, where the Brandenburg Gate and the French and U.S. embassies are. While the Berlin Wall was up, the square was part of the death zone, but now there's a Starbucks there. Go figure!

Next, we walked to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is a big square filled with rectangular concrete slabs that get taller and taller toward the center. As you walk through them, the ground also slopes up and down, so in the middle, they are way above your head. It's supposed to be disorienting. Walking through it is very eerie. There's also an information center underground, below the square, which I went back to later.

Later, we saw the site of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide. It's just a parking lot with nothing marking the spot because they don't want crazy extremists to make memorials or anything.

We also saw some old Nazi buildings. They used weird proportions to make the buildings seem very imposing and bigger than they actually are, and to make people look small when they go up to them. Like the windows on the top floors are smaller, and the doors are really big, with door knobs that are like chest-level.

Remnants of the Berlin Wall

Next, we walked by one of the remaining sections of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, which is actually just a reproduction. The tour guide emphasized strongly that Checkpoint Charlie and the associated museums were a huge tourist trap and a waste of time and money, which is what I'd read online.

Fake Checkpoint Charlie

We also saw the Gendarmenmarkt square, which has a theater and two almost identical cathedrals. According to a mixture of Wikipedia and what I remember the tour guide saying, French Huguenots,² who had fled to Berlin, built the first cathedral, and everyone was very impressed. But the Germans didn't want the French looking all cool on their territory, so they built a practically identical cathedral across the square. (Oooh, they showed them!) Actually, the cathedrals standing today have mostly been rebuilt since they were destroyed in World War II. That's one of the interesting things about Berlin; a lot of the buildings you see that look very old and historic, are actually meticulous recreations that were built after the originals were destroyed in World War II. 

The theater and one of the cathedrals. The other one looks just like it.

After, we walked to Bebelplatz³, where we saw the memorial for the books burned by the Nazis. You look down through a window in the ground, into a small room filled with empty book shelves. We also saw the Neue Wache building, which has the sculpture Mother with her Dead Son inside, as a monument to civilian victims of World War II. It was very solemn and sad.

Next, we passed Berliner Dom and the TV Tower, which I had seen the day before. We also stopped by Museum Island, which has five really famous museums, and we saw the building where Angela Merkel lives, which is across from one of the museums.⁴ 

Angela Merkel's appartment
building :O

So that was the speed tour of Berlin! I think it was almost four hours of walking, and I was pretty exhausted.  The tour gave me a good idea of what places I really wanted to make sure I got back to. It also made me realize just how present World War II and the Cold War are Berlin. Everywhere you look, there are signs of what happened - memorials, reconstructed buildings, structures left over from the Nazi and Communist governments. Even where the wall is no longer standing, there is a line of brick pavers down the middle of the street, marking where it once was.  As the tour guide said, even though Berlin is such a vibrant, modern, and influential city now, they have certainly made sure that no one will forget what happened in the past.

The Pergamon Museum, part of Museum Island

Anyways, this post is a little long, so I'll cover the rest of what I did this day in my next one. À bientôt!

1. It was also hellaaaaaaaa hot out. Trust me, the iced beverage was a necessity.
2. French Protestants who were persecuted in France in the 1600's and the beginning of the 1700's.
3. "Platz" means like place or square, btw.
4. I never realized her first name was pronounced with a hard "g" before. :O