31 August: Berlin Day 1

Early Start

For the first night after flying 9 hours east, we slept pretty well, not up until 6am. By 7 we were on the street. Took the U-Bahn (subway) to Potsdamer Platz and started walking. The weather forecast had been discouraging, mostly cloudy with 20% chance of rain. But to our delight the sky was mostly clear and only had scattered clouds all day.

First thing we noticed was the wacky roof of the Sony Center in the early light.

By the way, there are more pictures in the Smugmug gallery than we include here.

Famous Gate

Wanting to approach the Brandenburg Gate from the West so as to have the light behind it, David navigated us across a piece of the Tiergarten, the big green space in the middle of the city. Which by the way is thickly forested, not at all the open park we'd just assumed it would be.

Anyway, David mis-navigated and sent us at a slant that cost an extra kilometer of walking. But coming back toward the Gate we caught an early commuter defying traffic with the gate beyond.

Shortly after, a surly tourist dodging more commuters.

Then we went and took the standard pics.

The tour coaches had only just started arriving.

Not everybody gets it with the moon behind.

Reichstag

Next up, the Reichstag or Parliament building. It is topped by a glass dome that is said to be worth seeing.

There was a queue to get in even at 9:30.

There was also a thorough and rather intrusive security check, stiff as any airport check-in. However, the hour wait and annoyance was justified, the dome is spectacular to look at and to look out of.

To repeat: there are several more pictures of the Reichstag dome and other things in the Smugmug gallery. We're not putting everything here because it just gets too long to read and too tedious to edit.

Catholic Cathedral

We walked some ways down Unter Den Linden, meh, a wide shopping street with restaurants, and had an early lunch. Stopped at the Catholic cathedral in Bebelplatz, which appears to have been patterned on the Pantheon in Rome.

Bebelplatz is famous as the site of a 1933 book-burning by the Brown Shirts and Hitler Youth. That event is commemorated by an art work, "the empty library" which is impossible to photograph: a window set in the cobbles of that plaza below which is a small room lined with empty, white bookshelves (see the wikipedia link for an image).

Our Neighborhood

Back home for a rest, then in the evening light we went out to check out a park in our neighborhood of Pariserstrasse. It's a very pleasant area, streets lined with four-story apartment blocks, lots of trees. Two blocks down is LudwigKirchePlatz.

On this tiny square there is a play area that was heavily used, mothers and some dads with little kids, hanging out and talking and playing. Two sides of the area are lined with restaurants with sidewalk tables. Around back of the church is a garden for people who want quiet.

We sat here and read for a while before eating supper at a nearby place.