Where East Meets West

Alright, so working backwards, our next stop is Berlin.

Berlin is a fantastic city: lots to see, lots to do, and nothing ever closes. Just a few examples of the cool places I've been:

A Really Tall Building


The Berliner Dom

Berlin's answer to the Arc de Triomphe


The beautiful Opera House

One of many beautiful churches


Well in Berlin, I went to several museums, including:
The Pergamonmuseum, which focuses on the Fact and the Myth of ancient Baylon. This was my favourite museum, but unfortunately, I was not allowed to take pictures.
The Bode-Museum, which contains sculpture from Greece and Turkey. The building itself was beautiful, and I've posted my favourite of the sculptures below. It's actually a pair of sculptures, one depicting the Final Judgement, the other showing the fall of Satan and his legions. Both are done in amazing detail, and all those little figures you see are no bigger than my thumbnail.

The Alte museum contained Greek and Egyptian art and was also quite impressive.



I hit up the National Gallery (yawn) as well as the GDR museum, about what life was like in the former East Germany. The GDR Museum was pretty neat, but awfully small. But I do have a whole bunch of cool GDR facts to tell everyone now.

Of course, I had to check out Checkpoint Charlie (a former border crossing point in the Berlin Wall) and the museum there, which was all decidedly underwhelming. There's nothing left of the checkpoint to speak of and the museum was pretty mediocre, really only talking about successful and failed escape attempts. I did visit the longest section of the wall still standing, though, and that was pretty neat to see.



Throughout the city, you can see these oddly placed bricks. These denote where the Berlin Wall used to be.

Well in Berlin, I checked out an old concentraion camp, which was really something else. Chilling, to say the least. After the prisonners were liberated by the Russians during the war, the camp was turned into a Soviet camp to hold political prisonners, so it kind of has a doubly terrible (and maybe ironic?) history.

A few more sites for the photo obsessed (you know who you are):

An old, bombed-out church. Beautiful in a way.



A Holocaust Memorial. The blocks are over 2 meters high in places, and it's really neat to walk around between them. There are hundreds, if not thousands of large, concrete blocks.

The Berlin Gate (less impressive than I was lead to believe).



A cool Soviet war memorial

And of course, no Berlin photo album would be complete without a picture of the Reichstag.



So that's Berlin, I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.