Pergamon museum!

Berlin, day three. 19th of June

Today we tried to be a bit more relaxed and light and fluffy compared with previous days.

We started with the square we had almost got to the day before, which featured two identical churches (the French church and the German church) and a theatre.  

Facing this church on the other side of the square was a second church identical to this one.

The theatre.

Then we walked around the corner to Bebelplatz, the site of one of the huge book burnings of Jewish texts by Hitler and the Nazis (so much for light and fluffy). 

Bebelplatz.

Memorial about the book burning - a room of empty shelves.

Outside of war memorial.

Then we wandered along the huge boulevard of Under den Linden, and stopped into the war memorial for all peoples who died in the war (again, so much for light and fluffy). But it was another really beautiful piece of architecture and sculpture.

The statue is entitled Mother with her dead son

Then we walked to the musuemplatz, a square with no fewer than four rather amazing museums on it, and the Berliner Dom (which we didn't go into because they charged too much and we were still fairly churched out). 

Berliner Dom

One museum

Another museum

We skipped passed all the other museums until we got to our goal for the day: Pergamon Museum. We decided, since we didn't have much patience by this stage of the trip for spending four or five hours in a museum, we only bought a ticket to the permanent collection – we figured that was what we were actually there for anyway.

  

I highly recommend this museum! Especially if you have been to the Pergamon site in Turkey – The alter that is reconstructed within the museum is spectacular and also the small model of what the Pergamon site would have looked like really helped Greg and I reconcile what we had seen at the site with what was here at this museum. The alter is only the beginning as well, there are mosaic floors, statues and and gate, as well as other reconstructed sites from other Greek/Roman ruins. German archaeologists seem to be prolific looters! They claim that these ruins were being further destroyed by people stealing the stones for building and environmental factors.... soo that makes it ok to remove it another country and claim it... right?

The altar from the ruins of Pergamon in Bergama, Turkey

The frieze had been reconstructed as much as possible and ran around the entire room.

Small scale model of altar

Model of the site of Pergamon (in it's heyday)

Reconstructed mosaic floor from inside the altar

More thieved ruins from another site.

This gate, the Market Gate of Miletus, was phenomenal.

Opposite the gate was this thing as well.

Roman Romeo?

More amazing mosaic floor.

The Ishtar Gate was the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon. It was constructed in about 575BC by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II on the north side of the city. Nek Minnit, it's in a museum in Germany.

The middle east/Babylonian stuff was amazing as well. The Ishtar Gate was mind blowing as well as the Processional Way (Both from Babylon). 

Simply amazing.

The Processional Way.

And then what followed was a mind boggling collection of ancient stuff from all over the shop...

Upstairs was artwork from India and the middle east, predominantly Islamic art but also interestingly a reconstructed room of a Christian guy living in a predominantly Islamic culture who decorated his room for receiving visitors in an Islamic manner but with Christian stories and icons.

The Aleppo Room: a reception room from a broker's home in Aleppo, Syria that was commissioned during the Ottoman Period - the guy was a Christian in a Muslim society, so the decoration was in an Islamic style but featured images from old and new testament of the bible. This is just the door - it was a whole room - really interesting!

In the shop at the end we bought a book on Pergamon as it included pictures from both the site we had seen and the Red basilica and the asklepion, as well as the stuff present in the Berlin museum – so a rather good collection/summary of many we had seen.

Then, as usual, it was late for lunch and we starving, but very happy with our visit.

Interesting sights on the way to lunch... another Berlin riverside relaxing spot.

New Synagogue - very shiny!

Graffiti?

We wandered up past the New Synagogue to find a guidebook recommended cafe but we got there so late they were just starting their break between lunch and dinner. So we settled for a fancy Italian place up the road which was very lovely but a wee bit expensive!

Then the only thing left we really wanted to check out in Berlin was the shopping scene, so we took the underground to a street with three large, glossy, modern shopping malls connected by subterrainian passages. I was quite 'stuck' when we got to the shop selling all things French – especially in the wine and confectionary section. Unfortunately we couldn't afford anything in any of the shops as they were targeted at a wealthier clientele...

The artwork and architecture in the malls was much more interesting than the shops!! And free to look at!

We still had a bit of steam so we grabbed some icecream and headed back passed the Brandenburg gate into Tiergarten, a massive garden in the middle of the city. On the way we passed the memorial for people who had died trying to cross between East and West Berlin before the fall of the wall (i.e. were shot). 

We walked for about 15minutes before my steam ran out. We took another route out of the park and headed for the underground, to go back to the hostel for the last time.

These Pink pipes were everywhere in this quarter of the city. No idea why.

On the way back to the hostel, I required sugar and fat stat. Underground donut shop was happy to oblige.

I needed to get out some cash and the machine on the underground was out of order. So we asked the man on the hostel desk where the next nearest one was – turned out it was in the local, full sized supermarket. So we went there and got some cash and couldn't resist a look around. As usual I got chocolate and Greg got iced tea, and then we decided that since we had access to a kitchen we would do a DIY meal. Buns, salmon, and cream cheese (which took some finding, due to the many things that all look very similar to cream cheese and the annoying habit of all the labels being in German), and watermelon + yoghurt later, we were ready.

The buns needed baking so Greg sorted that out while I did the daily accounting in the 'red book'.

How often can you talk about having buns in the oven and actually mean it literally??

Then we ate and had way too much food for probably a quarter of what we would normally pay in a restaurant. There was a sheepish moment of 'maybe we should have done this sort of thing more often over the past few weeks'...But then I remembered all the yummy European food we had eaten that we never would have cooked for ourselves and I got over it.

Tired tired tired, and off to Hamburg the next day, we headed to bed.