Berlin, Germany Part II

One of the things I love about Europe is the age of many of its famous structures. These countries existed hundreds of years before the creation of the United States, and with that history come magnificent churches, castles, cathedrals, etc. For that reason, I was excited to visit Germany. Berlin, but it does not contain anything...well...old. Being a student of history, I knew that the allies heavily bombed Berlin during WWII, but I suppose it had never sunk in just how much of the city was leveled. 

We visited Berlin on Thursday, August 8, 2013 and found it just as dirty, noisy, etc as any major city. It’s funny, however, because things still looked old. Germany rebuilt Berlin to look like it was never bombed. To me, that made it lose some of its appeal/charm. They nearly completely rebuilt the cathedral, that we visited the night before (read about it here), in 1946. The original cathedral dated back hundreds of years which was impressive to me, but seeing a rebuilt cathedral didn't have the same WOW factor as say the Florence Duomo. 

There were still a good many things that I enjoyed seeing during our day and a half in Berlin. On our full day, we got up around 5AM, ate our breakfast pastries that we bought the night before and were at the train station by 6:40AM. We caught an early bus and were standing outside the Bundestag building by 6:55AM...slightly early for our 8AM Dome tickets. To pass the time, we took a walk around the immediate area and ducked into a bus stop while waiting for a morning shower/t-storm to pass. At 8:00, we passed through a quick security checkpoint and then went inside the Berlin parliament building. We were very glad that we visited early both before it got too crowded or too hot. 

Bundestag - Berlin Parliament Building

The tickets to the Bundestag don't include anything more than the dome which I knew ahead of time but still didn't love. Don't get me wrong, the dome is pretty incredible and the audio tour is amazing. The audio device is wired to sense where you are at any point of the dome and switch automatically to different tracks depending on the view you're currently looking at. Very intelligent and impressive technology for a tourist attraction. Be prepared for a lot of walking if you visit the dome. I highly recommend it. 

Dome tour atop the Berlin Parliament building

After visiting the dome, we walked to the Brandenburg Gate. Only about a 10 minute walk from the Bundestag, we stopped there on our way to the Berlin Holocaust memorial. I loved how there was almost no one at the Brandenburg Gate when we were there. My in-laws visited there later in the afternoon, and there pictures were much more crowded.

Brandenburg Gate - Berlin, Germany

The Berlin Holocaust Memorial is very large and interesting. Completed in 2005, I found it curious that it took 60 years for Berlin to do something like this. Better late than never, I suppose. It is quite extraordinary just how large the memorial is. No admission fee, you can just wander in and out at various points throughout the city. 

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe - Berlin, Germany

We continued walking around Berlin, and paid $0.50 to use one of the steaming hot city johns which were fascinating and amusing. From there, we walked to the Gendarmarkt which is a square with the opera house sandwiched between two identical churches one German and one French. I thought the square would have had food vendors of some sort or nearby restaurants, but since they had neither, we kept our time there to a minimum and kept going. 

Half of the Gendarnmarkt Square - Berlin, Germany

We took a quick detour through two exhibits on the Russian Gulag at the Berlin Story Museum. Nearly all of the exhibit material was in German, so although I found the artifacts interesting, we couldn't learn too much from the display labels or text panels. So, we left and made our way to museum island. On museum island in Berlin, they have 5 different museums focusing on everything from Byzantine art to ancient Egypt. We planned on going to the Egyptian museum at a minimum, but just the line to buy tickets far exceeded our patience, so we left. Hunger trumped our desired to stand in line for over an hour with no shade whatsoever. If you have more than a day in Berlin, I'm sure you could easily spend a full day or two just touring these museums. And if you only have a day in Berlin, and museums are the thing for you, perhaps you would make that more of a priority. Our afternoon agenda, however, had other things on it.

We left museum island fairly quickly avoiding the modern-day gypsies who were going up to tourists asking them if they spoke English. We ignored them and pretended not to understand. Having come full circle since early this morning, we found little pizzas for lunch right near our hotel and then headed to Alexanderplatz, the main train station. 

We took the S7 train to the Wannsee stop, then took the 114 bus 6 stops to the Haus der Wannsee Konferenz  For those of you who don't know what this is, it is the historic villa where top Nazi officials held a conference on January 20, 1942 where they decided the fate of European Jewry.  The villa was absolutely beautiful and situation on a very picturesque lake. The inside has been converted into a museum. I wish they could have incorporated a museum about the Holocaust and the Wannsee Conference without removing all of the furniture from the house itself. The rooms all stood empty with display cases and information panels on the walls. The museum was very informative if you weren’t already familiar with the subject, and in the room where they held the actual conference, you could read the meeting minutes which I found very interesting. I would have liked to see perhaps one panel that just gave a brief history of the villa itself before the infamous Nazi meeting.

Haus der  Wannsee Konferenz - Wannsee, Germany

Back of the Wannsee Conference House 

Afterwards, we took the train back to Berlin but got off at the Tiergarten instead of taking it back to our hotel. We walked the full length of the garden to the Brandenburg Gate again and took an over-heated bus back to the hotel. 

Tiergarten - Berlin, Germany

We reconnected with my in-laws for dinner and heard all about their day. We got some buttery breakfast danishes for the next morning and returned to the Radisson Blu for our last night in Berlin. If you recall from a previous post, I mentioned that our original plan had been to drive from Berlin to Prague to Vienna. Since the German rental car companies derailed that plan, in order to get to Vienna, we had to take a detour around the Czech Republic. To do that, we drove through parts of western Germany which you can read all about by clicking HERE.

Thanks for reading!

- Foxy the Traveler