Berlin

Berlin is, not surprisingly, a very big city. Our first day in Berlin was slightly complicated by pouring rain. It bucketed down, prompting us to seek out museums and attractions close to subway stations. Berlin has an excellent commuter rail network, and this served us well.

We managed to visit the Brandenburg Gate and holocaust memorial before the downpour began. The holocaust memorial is a strange sculpture or piece of installation art - a massive forest of concrete obelisks, all the same width and breadth but of varying heights, geometrically aligned in a matrix over a shallow depression in the ground. The effect as you wander through it is quite strange, and the only obvious connection to the holocaust seems to be the fact that the holocaust museum is located underground beneath the monument. The queue at the museum was ridiculously long, so we wandered off towards the Bundesreich, hoping to watch the impending storm from the glass observation dome atop the building. Foiled again! Yet another ridiculously long queue extended outside the building, so we set off to the Pergamon Museum, which is when the rain really started....

Plan B: Museums next to subway stations...

Haus am Checkpoint Charlie is a fascinating museum in a building right next to the old checkpoint. The American guardhouse (or possibly a reconstruction thereof) sits in the
middle of the street, complete with some enterprising people dressed as soldiers for tourists to take photos at the checkpoint. This museum documents the history of the Berlin Wall, and many of the escape attempts that took place throughout its history. Apart from the museum, there is hardly any evidence that the city was once so radically divided, complete with tanks and armed soldiers to assert the division and terms of agreement.

Cultural Affairs

The Blue Man Group is currently playing in Berlin, and having enjoyed the show so much in Boston, we decided to check it out. We managed to get a couple of student tickets (I love my TAFE card - only one museum has rejected it so far!) about a third of the way across the very front row of the stalls. These seats come with rain ponchos to protect the audience from the paint and food debris that might escape the stage... The show has been modified quite a bit since I saw it last, and the voice-overs have of course been translated. It's still an awesome theatrical experience, with some amazing visual effects and the BMG trademark percussion performances.

Just down the road from the Blue Man Theater (the German word for "Theatre"...) is the Sony Centre - an enormous steel and glass plaza containing a big Sony shop, lots of upmarket restaurants and cafes, and a cinema. The menu at the Australian restaurant looked OK, but I'm not in Germany to eat Australian food...

The Pergamon Museum is quite interesting. This purpose-built museum houses an extensive collection of antiquities excavated by German archaeologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the enormous Pergamon altar and the city gate of Miletus. Wikipedia has a good write-up on the museum here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Museum

We visited a few of Rhea's friends in Berlin, which took us to the outer suburbs and the to the shore of the Muggelsee. The Muggelsee is a large, sprawling lake which serves as an aquatic playground for the people of Berlin. Little marinas around the shores of the lake provide berths for small sports cruisers and even moderate sized keelboats (Bavarias seem particularly popular here).

The river tour of Berlin was the final hilight of this brief visit. The surprisingly long riverboats run regular cruises for tourists, passing many of the historical buildings in the city. It's interesting to see how many of the old stone buildings still show signs of bullet holes in the masonry. It's hardly surprising given the events of WWII, but it's still strange to see.

And that's about all you can cram into two days in Berlin, although neither of us was particularly disappointed about heading across to the holiday house in Belgium where we could relax in comfort and take a break from the daily routine of traipsing through crowded cities and museums!