Guten Tag lovely people!
A little catch up on what I was up to in the land of cheap beer, sausages and great museums.
I’m back and just about recovered from my trip to Berlin, what a stunning place! It’s not the prettiest city in the world but it’s got some beautiful bits, the river Spree was very atmospheric to walk along in the evenings and Museum Island is a Mecca for history and art nerds like me.
We visited the zoo and aquarium, both worth a look if you have time. I am particularly partial to staring at jellyfish though.
Museum Island is situated in the middle of the river spree and is home to five very large and imposing museums. We visited a couple and made sure to visit the Berliner Dom in the evening to see the light show projections. We also made sure to visit the Natural History Museum, see; I told you I was a nerd. The natural history museum houses the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world, Brachiosaurus brancai, it’s also the proud owner of the best example of an Archaeopteryx fossil anywhere in the world, and it’s apparently the fossil all others are compared to. So, if you have little people who are as enthralled by giant reptiles as I am, then the holidays a no brainer.
Now that’s not to say we didn’t do anything but look at old stuff all holiday, we made sure that we got to see a concert when we were there, not just any concert either. We witnessed the insanity that is a Lady Gaga arena show, honestly one of the oddest and best things I have ever had happen in front of my eyes. Between the costumes, lasers, canon and dancers it was a spectacle to say the least. I’m still not sure what happened entirely.
We also took half a day to visit what’s now called the East Side Gallery, a long section of the wall that’s still standing and now serves as a street art memorial to the wall, the victims of the wall and its eventual demise. I had realised it wouldn’t be a carefree day, I hadn’t realised how much seeing it would affect me. I really couldn’t get over the magnitude of what those slabs of concrete had meant to so many people. The wall stood for 29 years, that’s how old I am, I cannot imagine the entirety of my life in that way. That may make me naïve…or it just might mean I’m incredibly lucky to have never had to imagine a life that way before. Either way it muddled my brain for a few hours.
Berlin is a city of huge contrasts, high culture and low brow entertainment, cheap beer and fantastic food, industrial desserts in the middle rubbing shoulders with baroque architecture and graffiti and street art on every available surface.
I've covered this post with links to things we saw and did and some wiki history links if you want to read a bit more.