Of Berlin

Posted: June 18, 2013 | Author: thediaryofadork | Filed under: The Diary of a Dork: Regensburg '13 | Tags: Berlin, Berlin Zoo, Brandenburg gate, checkpoint charlie, train, travel | 3 Comments »

On June 14,  Friday morning, my roomate and I left Regensburg on an early train to take a weekend trip to Berlin. The train was late, which made our one transfer an iffy thing for a little while, but we made it after six hours of travel with little mishap. After lunching in the train station, in the presence of a surpring number of people communicating with hand signs- more on that later- we went to check into our hotel which we had booked ahead of time and was fortunately a stone’s throw away from both a U-bahn and an S-bahn station.

We got our room and dropped our bags off, a little surprised by our accomodations. It was a big room, but only because it housed three sets of bunkbeds, two washrooms, and a shower. We had only booked for a two-person room, but they must have run out them.

With a map from the desk downstairs, we went off to use the rest of our afternoon on sight-seeing. We started at Potsdamer Platz, which has more historical influence than anything to actually see there and made our way toward the Brandenburger Tor, or the Brandenburg gate. There was a memorial or a “thinking place” on the way for the Jews who died in the Holocaust. It’s hard to describe it. It was like a park or maze of conrete slabs, and when you walked through it, it was oddly quiet even though there were streets of traffic on either side.

At the Brandenburg gate there were lots of tourists and too much construction to get a good picture, but here’s one anyway.

We headed toward the Reichstag but weren’t allowed to get very close; policeman were stopping anyone who went toward the building because of someone kind of event. We walked along the Spree River until we found Musuem Insel, a group of five buildings in the middle of the Spree that house five musueums, We went into the first one, the Bode-Musuem named after it’s founder, but it closed at six, so we got kicked out after about an hour and a half. Of course, all the other musuems closed at the same time, so even though we found a few more, we couldn’t go in. We grabbed dinner and then wandered through the park in front of the Berliner Dom before heading back to our hotel to get some sleep before our next day.

I woke up on Saturday morning with a scratchy and sore throat, signs of a cold, and took some Tyelenol cold, a cup of orange juice, and two cups of tea for breakfast, as well other things from the breakfast buffett provided with the rent of our hotel room. Sickness momentarily and successfully put on hold, Steph and I headed back into Berlin mid-morning to start our whirlwind tour of all the musuems we could get our hands on.

We had bought a musuem pass the day before at a discounted student price that granted us access to all the public musuems. At the S-bahn station we bought Berlin Welcome Cards that morning because it was supposed to get us 48 hour access to yet other musuems and the public transportation (but that ended up bing a bust because it turned out that most of the other musuems only gave a discount with the BWC, and we got greater discounts in general with student IDs). The musuem pass ended up being a good decision however, as it counted as an entrance ticket for several places.

We went back to Musuem Insel first, where my roomate and I split up for a little over three hours. Of the four remaining musuems there I went into three, the first being my favorite. It contained paintings and sculptures from the 14-18th centuries-ish. The second musuem I went to had one floor of ancient Greek artifacts and art, and one floor of ancient Roman artifacts and art. The third was largely an Egyptian collection with the key exhibit being a bust of Neferteri. Egypt is a big cultural icon for Germans for some reason.

We met up at the planned time and headed to the deutsches historisches musuem, a musuem that showcased the history of Germany from around 300-2000 AD. It was really interesting to see the history of the world wars from a German point of view and to see all the political and historical machinations leading up to them. There was tons to see there, but we didn’t have time to look at it all.

We headed for Checkpoint Charlie next, and stopped in the Ritter Sport Flagship store in downtown Berlin where I bought way too much chocolate to bring back to Arizona with me. When we reached checkpoint Charlie my roomate didn’t even realize we’d arrived, which I hadn’t even thought about; Checkpoint Charlie was an American post, and since she’s not a citizen, she wasn’t really aware of its significance. It sounded like they were charging money to get a picture taken there, so I took my own.

The Checkpoint Charlie musuem was small and cost three times as much as the other musuems, so we didn’t go in. Instead, we finally got some dinner and then went back to the hotel and passed out.

We got up a little earlier the next morning and planned what we wanted to do over breakfast. There were still lots of things to see but we didn’t have alot of time. We took a long walk to Charlottenburg, a famous castle and landmark of Berlin. The grounds were prety but the castle had an overall rundown feeling; I felt like the castles in Vienna had been better taken care of. Then we went to the DDR musuem, a small private museum that showed some insights in the life of East Berliners. Then, tired of museums, we wandered the Berlin Zoo and the giant park surrounding it in the two hours before our train back to Regensburg.

Ende

---