Berlin

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We left Prague and took a five hour train ride to Berlin. The train was nice but had this weird system where some people had seat reservations and some (like us) didn’t, so there weren't two seats together anywhere in our car that were unreserved for the entire trip to Berlin. This meant that we, and lots of other people, had to juggle ourselves around in different seats for different segments of the trip. Kind of annoying.

Anyway, we made it to Berlin and found our way to St Christophers Hostel. The hostel was pretty big and corporate, but the positive side of that was that it was really really clean and it had a fun bar/restaurant downstairs with a good wireless internet connection.

On our first afternoon in Berlin we walked to an area called Museum Island, which as you might have guessed is an island with several museums on it. We went to the Pergamon Museum, which was really amazing. It is named after the 2,000-year old Pergamon Altar, which fills the entire central room of the museum and was part of the Pergamon Acropolis in what is now Bergama, Turkey. The museum also had a huge gate from Babylon, as well as an intricately painted room from the house of a Syrian merchant in the 16th century.

That night we spent at the bar at our hostel, using their fast internet and eating cheeseburgers and fish and chips for dinner. The next day was our only full day in Berlin, so we kind of had to be super-tourists. In the morning Jason went to the Gemaldegalerie, a museum with a lot of Renaissance paintings, among other things, and I went to the Postdamer Platz, which used to be divided in half by the Berlin Wall but is now kind of the symbol of urban revival in Berlin. We met back up and headed to Checkpoint Charlie, which was pretty touristy (you could get your picture taken with "real" American soldiers, and the food court nearby was called Snackpoint Charlie). We also saw an excellent outdoor museum called Topography of Terror, which told about the rise of the Nazis and about the Gestapo and the SS security organization.

Our last stop of the day was the Reichstag, where the German legislature met before 1933 and began to meet again in 1999. You take an elevator up to the top, where there is a huge glass dome built in 1999 that has great views over the city.

That night was our last in Berlin, and we had arranged to meet up for a drink with our friend Thomas, who we met in our intensive Portuguese class in Coimbra last September. He had just gotten back to Berlin from Portugal a couple of days before, so it was fun to talk with him about Portugal. It was also interesting to hear more about Berlin's recent history from someone who actually experienced it.

Overall, Berlin was great and we both really wished we’d had another day there. It was kind of a nice antidote to all of the perfectly cute and quaint little old town areas that we've been in a lot this summer. Berlin is not necessarily the most beautiful city we've seen, but it felt really young and lively and modern. There were tons of international restaurants (we had great Vietnamese food the second night) and trendy bars and shops, and everyone seemed very hip and cosmopolitan. Hopefully we'll make it back there again someday!

- Lindsay

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Photos

Checkpoint Charlie
You can pay to take a picture with the "real" American soldiers standing there