We got up early this morning to get up to the Reichstag before the crowds got there – but unfortunately we didn’t beat them and when we walked around the corner we were greeted by the sight of dozens of tour buses parked along the street and a line three times longer than we saw yesterday. So we got burned there but we decided to stick it out and wait. It ended up being about an hour and a half before we were through security but while we were waiting we were entertained by a troupe of puppeteers controlling a giant man who walked through the crowd hamming it up and doing various gymnastics.
Finally we made it into the Reichstag which as I said earlier is Germany’s current capitol building. The actual building has stood on this spot for a very long time but was burned to a shell at the outbreak of World War II. Actually there is quite a bit of political intrigue there but I won’t go into that (see more about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire). It sat abandoned throughout the Cold War with the wall running directly behind it. Eventually it was remodeled by architect Norman Foster into the amazing building that it is today. The biggest tourist attraction here is the great glass dome that replaced the old cupola that was lost during the fire. Two ramps spiral up the inside of the all glass dome around a giant cone made of mirrors that direct sunlight into the assembly room below. The dome is also completely open so it also creates a convection current that naturally cools the assembly chambers without any need for air conditioning. Also the view from the ramps and the top of the roof of the surrounding area is spectacular.
Leaving the Reichstag we walked up Ebert Strasse Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe– a brilliantly done public space. The land gently undulates in a bowl shaped depression laid over with cobblestones while a grid of large monoliths is overlaid that with each one having a different height such that the tallest monoliths are approximately at the deepest part of the depression. So as you walk into the forest of monoliths it becomes more and more like a disorienting labyrinth. I say it’s brilliant as a public space because it’s a thoughtful memorial without being too stern and it’s large enough so that kids can play in the space without disturbing people who are there looking for thoughtful introspection.
After that we continued down Ebert Strasse to Potsdamer Platz which has become sort of the Times Square of Berlin. The architecture is very bold and modern however it acted like a black hole and we were sucked in for what seemed like four hours having lunch and dessert in two separate places in what was basically a mall. It’s very heavily commercialized in the American/Western style and the context is quite jarring from the rest of Berlin which is fairly laid back for being such a large city. We finally left the area in various levels of irritability which eventually subsided as we got back into the more realistic parts of the city.
From Potsdamer Platz we walked toward Checkpoint Charlie with a short detour to see the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof train station which suffered severe bombing during the war. Actually, now it is just the entrance that remains but it was still neat to see and in the middle of a Bauhaus style neighborhood. Checkpoint Charlie was incredibly tacky and we didn’t stay longer than the time it took to take a picture of the McDonalds looming over the little guard shack and grimace at the I Heart CPC t-shirts.
Instead we retraced our steps to the Topography of Terror museum of the holocaust. It was located at the former headquarters of the SS and was left as rubble with a portion of the wall and a small but very nice museum in a modern building. The museum was very moving and difficult to stomach but educational.
We had quite a bit of time until our dinner reservations but didn’t quite feel like going back to the boat so we ended up sitting at a café in the Gendarmen Markt between the French Cathedral and the German Cathedral – yes, those are their real names. Hedda had a Berliner Weiss which was sort of a watermelon or sour apple flavored beer that was a deep emerald green. It was not popular among our group. While we were sitting there a string quartet began playing by the fountain in the plaza and a bachelor party rolled by on a bar where each bar stool had a set of bicycle pedals so the party could pedal around the city and drink at the same time. The bartender was also the driver but everyone had to pedal (and sing drinking songs at the top of their lungs). It looked like a ridiculous amount of fun. We also taught Hedda and Doris the fun of Yer Mom jokes.
Dinner was at a Moroccan place called Kasbah that was in the northern part of the city that used to be more of a Jewish quarter but is now very international. It too was a very good dinner in a very nice atmosphere. The food itself was a bit too salty for our tastes but was still very good.
We ended the evening with a quick trip to the top of Fernsehturm, the Berlin version of the observation deck on top of a television transmitter that are always a lot of fun to go up into. The tower is most famous for it’s “Pope’s Revenge”. The story goes that the East German government made it illegal for churches to have crosses on their steeples and so as construction was completed on the Fernsehturm, which features a spherical observation pod covered with a faceted mirrored surface it became apparent that when the sun shone directly on the tower it would reflect off the mirrors – in the shape of a giant cross - and on the tallest structure in East Germany no less!
We returned to the boat and found our little neighborhood was jumping with revelers even though there really weren’t too many bars in our immediate vicinity. Even the bar on the top deck of our boat was alive with dancing people. Most of our group went directly to bed but Kendra and I decided to venture out for one last German beer before calling it a night. We crossed over the river again to a cluster of nice, sophisticated bars that we had noticed the night before and along the way we discovered the epicenter of all the revelry. We couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on but people were lined up around the block – well after midnight – to get into this nondescript looking group of buildings. But the bar we went to was nice, we sat outside and watched all the bicyclers still whizzing about even though it was so late. Those Berliners sure like their bicycles, they were everywhere! We returned to the boat after one drink feeling more relaxed and ready for sleep. Our final day in Berlin will be up tomorrow!
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