Berlin

Very early (too early for me) on the 26th Clemens, dad, and I left Borken for Berlin. On the way Clemens insisted on stopping for the best pizza ever about 30 minutes outside of Potsdam. It was good…. But the cool part of the town was this huge pink house an artist built. Just look at the picture, it’s really neat.

We stopped in Potsdam to look a palace built by a Frenchman. The grounds were gorgeous, from the outside the palace was gorgeous, but we weren’t able to go inside unfortunately.

Then, around 4:00 in the afternoon we arrived in Berlin. Our hotel is located in West Berlin surrounded by some very beautiful and modern buildings. Berlin was bombed almost to the ground during WWII so there is a mixture here of old buildings and new. This picture is of the only part left standing of the church near our hotel. The citizens of Germany left the church as it is as a monument to the stupidity of war.

On our exploration of Berlin, we hopped from subways to trains across town. We saw the Reichstag, Check Point Charlie, A Story of Berlin (the history of the city), an Atomic Bomb Shelter, the Jewish Museum, and wandered the streets looking at the differences in the buildings and between East and West Berlin. If anyone goes to Berlin, you have to go to the "A Story of Berlin" museum. At least in this museum you can get a taste of what this city is all about. Then, I would recommend the Check Point Charlie Museum and the Jewish Museum. All of these museums are very interesting and we could have spent days in each of them reading all of the information. Everywhere you look there was something else to read, but my favorite part of all of these museums was the layout. The museums were interactive and you could touch stuff. The rooms were set up almost like a maze, so literally you could get lost wandering through history. The Jewish Museum's design and layout was symbolic of all kinds of stuff. Next time I go through I want to take the tour to learn all the symbolic meaning of the slanted floors, weird windows, and odd structures. And... the Jewish Museum was not as despressing as we expected. Since the 15th century when Constantine declared Christianity to be the state religion, the Jews have been pursecuted. Everytime they built themselves up in society, they were torn back down by jealous Chrisitians. But, somehow this religion has survived all of these centuries.

"The museum itself is a work of art, blurring the lines between architecture and sculpture."

If you guys are as interested in the Jewish Museum as I am (it's so neat) here's a good link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Museum_Berlin

A quote to end on by Barouch de Spinoza: