BERLIN – Germany (Fri 07 Aug)

We went for a walk down Kurfurstendamm Street. Very nice and very expensive, but there is only so much of nice and expensive that you can take when you don’t have the purse strings to match, so we both got distracted by different priorities.

I went into a museum called ‘The story of Berlin’. This was a very well set up interactive museum. Not so much interactive in the sense of pushing knobs and levers, but more becoming involved in the displays. Walking through and over bombed out houses, walking through a passage to the sounds of walking on broken glass during the Jewish persecutions. The exhibit showing the two sides of the wall, had a Berlin wall down the middle of the hall with examples of day to day living on each side as it would have been. I thought that all these periods were displayed very well. But probably the aspect that I liked best was that it didn’t just focus on the recent past, but also the older periods of the Kaiser’s and the ages and periods that led to the recent history. It all helped paint a picture of how these events unfolded, and ended in their main drawer card, an underground nuclear fallout shelter. It really was a learning experience and well worth the visit.

While I was doing that Justine was being a lot more cultural, she was visiting the Gemaldegalerie. In her words this was a feast of art history. Made more interesting by the fact that this is a purpose built gallery, rather than an exhibition housed in an old building. There are 1500 pieces on display out of a collection of 3000. Covering artists from the 13th to the 19th Century, including large collections of Remembrant, Botticelli, and Rubens.

After this we went to Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz to take some photos before heading to the Reichstag. What is interesting is that the U Bahn that we had been catching at Potsdamer Platz, was one of the (about) 13 ghost stations that existed throughout the cold war. When the Wall went up, there were suddenly all these stations that were now inside the East zones, underground. These stations were just sealed up and patrolled by the East, to stop escapees, and the trains just passed through without stopping. Hard to imagine now.

Anyway, back to the Reichstag, if you want to go there be prepared to queue, we were in the queue for over an hour, and many people got tired of waiting and left in that time. Once there you go through the usual security checks before you can catch the lift to the roof. Interesting that this is the building that houses the government and they proudly proclaim that they have over 13 million visitors per year, and yet they only have one security scanner. Surely it would be more efficient to have a t least a couple especially since they have a reputation for long waiting periods. Nevertheless, our objective was to walk around the inside of the glass dome, and to look down into government. This little feature is an outward display of the German government’s desire to be transparent. A nice idea we thought and certainly a very nice view from the top of the dome.