Travel week: Berlin

We got through security in Berlin, and slept until we got onto our plane. After the plane landed in Berlin we were a short train ride from our hostel. Dropping our luggage off (at 9 am, we couldn't check in), we headed out to explore. Our first stop was the East Side Gallery of the Berlin wall. This is a reconstruction of the wall that artists have painted.




This one of the most famous painting on the Berlin wall. It depicts 2 communist leaders.



After the wall, we road the train to another stop, I'm not quite sure what we were looking for here, but we got lunch and killed enough time until we could go back to the hostel. Once we checked into our rooms we crashed. After a 3 hour nap we got up, shower and set off to find this certain area of town that was supposed to have lots of bars and restaurants. Well either the directions we got were bad or we just didn't follow them correctly, but we never found this so called area. But we did find this great Indian Restaurant, and we finally got to eat dinner! It was actually delicious!!!

Wednesday morning we got up and set off to see the sights. First stop was the museum district. There is a beautiful old church that we got many pictures of, and we went to the Pergamonmuseum, which is the history museum in Berlin. The Pergamonmuseum houses some amazing relics, but the most famous is the Ishtar gate from the Babylonian Empire.



The old building was getting a facelift, would have been so pretty without the scaffolding.



The Ishtar gate...



Our next stop was the Brandenburg Gate. This used to separate east and west Berlin, now it is the symbol for a reunited city.



After the gate, we went to the Holocaust memorial. It consisted of a bunch of rectangular stones of different sizes. It had a exhibit under the memorial with a timeline and letters from the deceased. This exhibit was even stronger than the Anne Frank house of showing the destruction caused by WWII.



There was a timeline in the exhibit showing the persecution of the Jews.



The final stop for the day was Checkpoint Charlie, which was the U.S. checkpoint between east and west Berlin. The little booth was complete with a US flag in front, and a little sign thanking the US for the help in Berlin.




After the days sightseeing we got cleaned up and headed out on a pub crawl. Jamie, Chelsea, and I made friends with some German guys on the Pub crawl and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves! Waking up the next morning to catch the train was not as much fun, yet we had a 6 hour train ride to sleep!

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