Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Friday July 08, 2005
Today was going to be a sight-seeing day in Berlin for Andrzej and I. The weather was on-and-off drizzly, but the temperature was still decently warm. I decided that we would take the U-Bahn (subway) to Potsdamer Platz and walk it from there.
Potsdamer Platz used to be abandoned, the Berlin Wall used to run straight through it. Now it's a hub of activity, with tall glass-and-steel buildings, cinemas, and the Canadian Embassy!
From there we started to walk up the street towards the Brandenburg Gate. On the way, we passed the Holocaust Memorial. This undulating lot filled with gray, rectangular slabs of various heights is an eerie place, somewhat like a cornfield...
After a short walk, we reached the Brandenburg Gate, one of the most identifiable landmarks in Berlin. The whole area around the Gate was under construction (just like much of the rest of Berlin).
From there we walked around a bit until we found ourselves at the Reichstag, the seat of the German government. There was a HUGE line there, so we didn't bother to go in.
We continued walking into the huge park in the centre of Berlin. We walked a long way. Eventually we reached this big traffic circle and found the Siegesaule (Victory Column) in the middle of it. The Berlin portion of the Live 8 concert was held around this statue six days prior to us being there.
We walked down the whole length of the Tiergarten and caught a train back to the other side of the Berlin core, to Museum Island. It's an island in the Spree River with five large museums. There's only one that I wanted to go to, the Pergamon Museum, filled with Greek and Middle Eastern antiquities.
The architecture of Museum Island:
The Pergamon Museum is what I expected it to be... really good. I'm a nerd and I like the Ancient Greek and Mesopotamian cultures... The Pergamon Museum has a full altar that the German archaeologists of the 19th century looted from what is today Turkey. This altar is huge! Unfortunately my camera only managed to take blurry pictures of it. But I'll include one here just so you can see how big it is.
Moving on, we found the Ishtar Gate, a gate recovered and reconstructed from the site of Ancient Babylon. This gate is the main reason I came to this museum. It's actually the smaller portion of a two-part gate. It's hard to imagine how big the second part would be.
Moving on we found a collection of stele (tall carvings in rock that were designed to impress and/or frighten people... usually put up by kings to show how awesome and powerful they were, and inscribed with curses to smite anyone who damaged them), other statues and artifacts.
In particular, I like these statues of Assyrian Winged Bulls. They're cool because they are designed to be looked at either straight from the front, or straight from the side. If you look at them from the front, you see two legs. If you look at the from the side, you see four legs. But if you break the rules and look at them from an angle, you actually see five legs! This statue is pretty big... it's probably eight feet tall.
I'm also a fan of ancient writing. I think it's really amazing to be able to read what people 3000 years ago were writing about. Most of these things are inventory lists, ingredients for magickal spells, astronomical observations, or propoganda about how amazing the king was:
There was also a large collection of statues from Classical Greece there, too. They're nice, but I'm more of a fan of the Assyrian stuff.
By the time we left the museum, it was the middle of the afternoon and it was raining harder. We took a bus across town to the shopping district in West Berlin, not too far from our hotel. There we found the largest department store in Europe, KaDeWe (I think). I was amused to see the front of the store decked on in a fake-anime theme!
KaDeWe had lots of brand names and clothes and was a pretty posh store. I wasn't there to look at such things... I had a long list of CDs that I was looking for. My journey to KaDeWe was successful... I found one of the four Lunik CDs that I was looking for.... YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYYAY
So after KaDeWe, we started to walk towards our chosen restaurant. Andrzej called his parents and girlfriend (this picture came out pretty clearly, so I decided to upload it here, since so many of the pictures I took of Andrzej are sorta blurry):
I decided to take Andrzej out for his first Indian food. Yes, I even managed to continue my Indian food kick in Europe. It was spicy and yummy!
So we started to walk back towards the hotel. We passed by a bombed-out old cathedral that was left unrepaired as a sort of war memorial.
Oh! Then I took an AWESOME picture of myself drinking water from a fountain. I hope you enjoy this picture as much as I do:
Andrzej and I stopped off at the supermarket to pick up some beverages for us to sample and enjoy (yeah, I couldn't get enough of the lemonade-beer stuff):
We rested up for a while and went back into the centre of town to go to a certain music store, Dussman, that was mentioned in my Lonely Planet. We managed to show up 20 minutes before it closed. In my mad rush around the store to try and find some CDs on my list, I didn't manage to find anything I was looking for! Boo!
Potsdamer Platz used to be abandoned, the Berlin Wall used to run straight through it. Now it's a hub of activity, with tall glass-and-steel buildings, cinemas, and the Canadian Embassy!
From there we started to walk up the street towards the Brandenburg Gate. On the way, we passed the Holocaust Memorial. This undulating lot filled with gray, rectangular slabs of various heights is an eerie place, somewhat like a cornfield...
After a short walk, we reached the Brandenburg Gate, one of the most identifiable landmarks in Berlin. The whole area around the Gate was under construction (just like much of the rest of Berlin).
From there we walked around a bit until we found ourselves at the Reichstag, the seat of the German government. There was a HUGE line there, so we didn't bother to go in.
We continued walking into the huge park in the centre of Berlin. We walked a long way. Eventually we reached this big traffic circle and found the Siegesaule (Victory Column) in the middle of it. The Berlin portion of the Live 8 concert was held around this statue six days prior to us being there.
We walked down the whole length of the Tiergarten and caught a train back to the other side of the Berlin core, to Museum Island. It's an island in the Spree River with five large museums. There's only one that I wanted to go to, the Pergamon Museum, filled with Greek and Middle Eastern antiquities.
The architecture of Museum Island:
The Pergamon Museum is what I expected it to be... really good. I'm a nerd and I like the Ancient Greek and Mesopotamian cultures... The Pergamon Museum has a full altar that the German archaeologists of the 19th century looted from what is today Turkey. This altar is huge! Unfortunately my camera only managed to take blurry pictures of it. But I'll include one here just so you can see how big it is.
Moving on, we found the Ishtar Gate, a gate recovered and reconstructed from the site of Ancient Babylon. This gate is the main reason I came to this museum. It's actually the smaller portion of a two-part gate. It's hard to imagine how big the second part would be.
Moving on we found a collection of stele (tall carvings in rock that were designed to impress and/or frighten people... usually put up by kings to show how awesome and powerful they were, and inscribed with curses to smite anyone who damaged them), other statues and artifacts.
In particular, I like these statues of Assyrian Winged Bulls. They're cool because they are designed to be looked at either straight from the front, or straight from the side. If you look at them from the front, you see two legs. If you look at the from the side, you see four legs. But if you break the rules and look at them from an angle, you actually see five legs! This statue is pretty big... it's probably eight feet tall.
I'm also a fan of ancient writing. I think it's really amazing to be able to read what people 3000 years ago were writing about. Most of these things are inventory lists, ingredients for magickal spells, astronomical observations, or propoganda about how amazing the king was:
There was also a large collection of statues from Classical Greece there, too. They're nice, but I'm more of a fan of the Assyrian stuff.
By the time we left the museum, it was the middle of the afternoon and it was raining harder. We took a bus across town to the shopping district in West Berlin, not too far from our hotel. There we found the largest department store in Europe, KaDeWe (I think). I was amused to see the front of the store decked on in a fake-anime theme!
KaDeWe had lots of brand names and clothes and was a pretty posh store. I wasn't there to look at such things... I had a long list of CDs that I was looking for. My journey to KaDeWe was successful... I found one of the four Lunik CDs that I was looking for.... YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYYAY
So after KaDeWe, we started to walk towards our chosen restaurant. Andrzej called his parents and girlfriend (this picture came out pretty clearly, so I decided to upload it here, since so many of the pictures I took of Andrzej are sorta blurry):
I decided to take Andrzej out for his first Indian food. Yes, I even managed to continue my Indian food kick in Europe. It was spicy and yummy!
So we started to walk back towards the hotel. We passed by a bombed-out old cathedral that was left unrepaired as a sort of war memorial.
Oh! Then I took an AWESOME picture of myself drinking water from a fountain. I hope you enjoy this picture as much as I do:
Andrzej and I stopped off at the supermarket to pick up some beverages for us to sample and enjoy (yeah, I couldn't get enough of the lemonade-beer stuff):
We rested up for a while and went back into the centre of town to go to a certain music store, Dussman, that was mentioned in my Lonely Planet. We managed to show up 20 minutes before it closed. In my mad rush around the store to try and find some CDs on my list, I didn't manage to find anything I was looking for! Boo!
# posted by Rob Szumlakowski @ 11:00 a.m. 
