We arrived in Berlin on New Years Day and were rewarded with lots of snow! Madrid has nice weather much like Southern California, but we were craving some weather that was more wintery - and we got it in Berlin. Our first stop after checking into the hotel was a walk down to the Checkpoint Charlie area and a stop in at the local Starbucks to watch the snow fall. We didn't do the Checkpoint Charlie Museum but we did walk around the area where they have information on when the Berlin Wall was constructed and the number of people who tried to escape over the wall until it was torn down. Some of the statistics were heartbreaking - the ages of some of the people who lost their life trying to cross into West Berlin included children as young as 5!
The building there is not the actual US Army "Checkpoint Charlie" used during the cold war - it was built for us tourists to show where the building used to be. The last building used by the allied forces at Checkpoint Charlie is at the Alliemuseum which we visited a few days later.
After meandering around this area a bit we headed toward Museum Island. Berlin has so many great museums! We visited as many as we could pack into our vacation but barely scratched the surface. We'd seen the Pergamon Museum covered on a travel show and thought it looked cool so we made our way there. This is a museum that I think would impress pretty much anyone - it focuses on archaelogical finds and has entire walls and temples housed inside that the museum had to be designed around. It's fantastic.
One of the most amazing parts of the museum is walking onto the Pergamon Altar. This piece is huge as you can see and the walls of the museum surrounding it are covered with a long frieze that depicts the "struggle of the Gods and the giants". It's pretty awesome, but as there was no flash photography - my photo is not so awesome:
Still I think it gives you an idea of the size of the thing. You can also see the Ishtar Gate from Babylon reconstructed in the museum. These pics are much better:
It's just amazing.
I can not for the life of me remember where this piece is from but it was also impressive:
The snow continued to fall while we were in the museum and we tried to get a photo of how pretty everything looked outside but it was difficult to get a good shot:
After the museum we headed back to the hotel to grab a nap (our flight left Madrid at 6 am!) before dinner. Dinner was awesome German food: Brats and saurkraut for the Hubby and schnitzel (that may technically be Austrian - but delicious either way) for me. Delicious food and HUGE portions. I love Germany!!!
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