Berlin continued...

next two days..

Sunday 3/29
Another grocery store yogurt breakfast. (the sill of our hotel window has become a mini-fridge for yogurt and beer - just the essentials.) We left the hotel at 10am (9am on the body clock) and our whole group walked to the Pergammon museum. Where we saw a bunch of old Greek and Roman statues and art, Islamic art and textiles and a section on Greek mythology which I particularly enjoyed. On our way there we saw the Berliner Dom which is an awesomely ornate cathedral that was almost completely destroyed in WWII, and later restored, and the a big pretty gallery. After the museum we stopped in a flea market for a bratwurst lunch ( I’ve decided that I definitely prefer normal sized hot dogs, but globs of mustard helped) and then we shopped around a little bit, and I bought a really cute hat which helped keep me warm. We took a metro next, and walked to a preserved area of the Berlin wall. It was a little enclosed area of no-mans land with sand and footprints in it still, not physically accessible to anyone. Berlin has a big theme of preserving parts of the past so they are not forgotten, which I think is great and more places should do it. We climbed up the tower across the street to see the aerial view of this place, then watched some history films in the exhibit downstairs. Eye opening, and tragic, yet ironically most of the group fell asleep. We walked down the block to see a reconstructed church from a bombing in 1965? It was again neat how they preserved some old parts of it when rebuilding.
We headed to Invaliden Park after that, where we saw and climbed up the “sinking wall” (absent of water ) and played on a nearby playground with monkey bars and more spinny things. Next we continued walk down to Kanzleramt which is a big spacey park area on the river with huge-scale buildings and pretty bridges. We also saw throughout the day, brick line running through the city that represents where the Berlin wall used to stand. After that we headed back toward the museum area and Jeremy, Laura-nelle, Gennie and I broke off from the group to get some coffee and snacks. We went to the main train station, Hosbaunhof, where I had a big bowl of fruit and bought some cookies for later, then we metro-ed back to the hotel around 7:30. A small group of us went to dinner around the corner at Alpenlandische Sperinlitnten at 8:00, where I had wildgoulashsuppe (all one word) which was sort of a small bowl of meat and gravy- interesting to say the least. Then we went back to the hostel and passed out around 11:30pm.

Monday 3/30
We woke up early and packed up all our stuff to store in the hotel basement, (more yogurt for breky) then trekked out to the Nueu National Gallery In Kulturforum (center of fine arts.) It was a gallery that seemed to be pretty empty but had some really cool sculptures around it. I really liked the kinetic one by Michael Riki? After that we went to the Bauhaus which is a famous German design school that was shut down during World War II, but was the learning/teaching environment of a lot of well-know artists. There were a lot of cool things to see there. We took a short bus ride to a city center area next to see The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which was bombed out during WWII but remains standing. We couldn’t go inside because it was closed but the view of the outside was pretty phenomenal in itself. We grabbed some cheap lunch from a little Asia stir-fry tent then watched a street show of guys performing crazy dance and skateboard moves to the tune of Thriller. It’s safe to say they put my dance moves to shame…and then some. We explored a few souvenir shops after that and a bunch of the guys bought 5 Euro suspenders with various silly themes on them. This was the point at which I placed Dave’s filthy rubber chicken “Alberti“ (which he found in the dirt of the railroad park on Friday) in a bag at the souvenir shop, as a joke, knowing he saw me take it. But apparently he was too distracted by his fish,/duck/gun suspenders to pay attention, so Alberti got left behind and I got the slack and dirty looks for it for the rest of the day, even though I probably saved Dave from some nasty disease like Chlamydia (that chicken was seriously gross.) We took the metro back to the hostel to get our luggage, then back to the main train station for our 5:00pm train back to Prague. Things went smoothly from there and we got back to Prague around 9:30pm. A jam packed weekend, tired legs, and sweaty clothing, but a lovely German experience.

Tuesday consisted of a trip to the fabric store “Flex Tex” across town, and an exhilarating beekeeping class in which we learned that “Honey is Money” and all about breeding and selling Queen bees. I also sewed Dave a replacement Alberti (his more fashionable cousin, Alberto) for which he was very grateful.

Lauren