Filed under: Travel
Day 1
We arrive at the airport and catch a bus to the train station where we book our overnight train for Munich. Then we take the U-Bahn to our hostel, St. Christopher’s Inn. It’s really nice! Cool furniture and a nice restaurant in the lobby. It is getting late so we head out to wander around the city. We hit the Museumsplein or Museum Island and see the Berliner Dom and Altes Museum. Then we get dinner and meet up with friend-of-a-friend Tom for drinks. He gives us a beer tour of Berlin (he is studying there this semester) including a bar that sells beers on a sort of stock market, where prices vary based on popularity (but probably they just vary randomly and it is all just for fun).
Day 2
We wake up early for breakfast in the hostel and then head out to get a free walking tour of the city. Our tour guide, Andrew, is awesome and has an awesome name. The tour lasts about 3 and a half hours and hits pretty much all of the major sights. It was nice to get a good overview so we could choose what spots we want to go back to. We see the Brandenburg Gates, the Holocaust Memorial, which is very interesting, the Berlin wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the opera house, a memorial to the Night of Broken Glass (a giant underground space with empty bookshelves representing all the books burnt that night), and we end on the Museumsplein, where our tour guide tells the story of how West and East Berlin were finally unified (which basically happened by accident). For dinner we go to a restaurant recommended by our tour guide that serves traditional German food. It is delicious and our waiter was quite funny. Even though he warned us if we sat outside he wouldn’t be that quick he was actually quite attentive. At night we head to the Reichstag (the German parliament building) and go up to the giant glass dome on top to look out over the city. The view is very impressive, and the beautiful glass dome was designed by the same person who designed London City Hall and the building in the City of London affectionately known as The Gherkin, Sir Norman Foster. An interesting connection.
Day 3
Now somewhat familiar with the city, Brandon, Becky and I hit some of the sights we are interested in seeing more in depth. In the morning we visit the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, which is now a museum housing sculptures by the architect K.F. Schinkel who designed the church and many other buildings in Berlin. Next we head to the Pergammon Museum and see the Ishtar Gates, which are impressive to say the least. The whole museum houses antiquities that seem almost too large to be real. Determined to sample the local specialty in each city we visit, we get Currywurst for lunch, which is a sausage with ketchup and curry powder. It is actually quite good and needless to say we continue to eat it throughout the day as it is cheap and they probably won’t have it anywhere but Berlin. After lunch we head out of the city a ways to try and go to the Zoo. It starts to rain, though, so we opt for the aquarium instead and see the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche on the way. The aquarium turns out to be excellent and we have a lot of fun looking at various fish including a tank full of Garibaldi all the way from Southern California! Next we walk down the street to KaDeWe, Germany’s answer to Harrod’s. It is a huge department store, but obviously we focus on the toy department. I take a look at the train layout and we all take pictures with a giant stuffed bear. After the department store we all meet up again at the train station to get our overnight train to the next stop on our tour, Munich.
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