1 Sept: Berlin Day 2

The main target this morning was two of the five museums on Museum Island, an island in the river Spree ("shpray"). Marian has a rule of no more than two museums in a day, so we were off to see the Pergamon and Bode museums, giving Queen Nerfertiti and some Old Masters a miss.

We're getting quite used to the U-Bahn or subway system. Not as technological or as spiffy as the Tokyo subway, it's reminiscent of the London Underground. It even smells the same, David says, a kind of creosote-y chemical odor. Marian can't smell it. Smell or not, it's a good system; we've never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a train, usually less.

Changing trains at Stadtmitte station this morning we shared the platform with a class of pre(?)school kids.

they were cute cute cute

Pergamon Museum

The Pergamon Museum houses the things dug up by German archeologists in the 1800s. Its prize is the Pergamon Altar.

Every tour group gets this far and takes its picture.

Pergamon was a Greek kingdom on the coast of Turkey. It was excavated in the 1880s and the altar (tons of info on it) dug up along the fragments of a huge frieze that wrapped it. The original may have looked like this.

Only, not bone-white! See below.

Some visitors sit quietly and listen to their audio guides. The audio guides were very good and worked well.

Some climb the stairs to learn more about Telephos, the founder of the city and subject of the frieze.

Among the things at the top were this nice floor mosaic from the palace, 200AD(?).

Note use of perspective and shadow well before the renaissance.

The tour groups didn't seem to get much further into the extensive halls of the Museum where there were no crowds but some other small exhibits, like:

Gate to the market of the town of Miletus

The Ishtar Gate to Babylon.

We were struck by an exhibit of polychromy, reconstructing the coloring the Greeks used on their statuary.

Temple sculpture of a warrior guarding Athena

Funerary statue of a girl named Phrasiklea.

Marian thinks the colors were gaudy and make the figures look fake. Statues oughta be gray! David thinks they are neat and make him like the Greeks a bit more.

Among the visitors were many high-school kids studying sketching.

Bode Museum

After a stop for some juice, we went to the Bode Museum, which specializes in sculpture.

Tip of Museum Island, River Spree on the left, Spree Kanal right.

Maybe we were museumed-out by then, or it may have been some officious museum guards that bugged us, but this wasn't so fun. Some beautiful little things but room after room of statues of saints from the altars of baroque churches.

It's worth noting that all the museums (so far) allow photography. Maybe that's yielding to the inevitable in the day of miniature cams and phone cams, but it's nice, to those who remember how museums used to operate.

After lunch in a Kamp's (chain restaurant), good sandwiches on really delicious seedy bread, we headed home via Alexanderplatz and the awesomely ugly Neptune fountain.

Mr. Video Man can't get his subjects to wave.

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtnis Kirke

Headed out to find some supper at a very pleasant square called Savigny Platz, which took us for the first time to the surface at the Zoo station of the U-Bahn. Where our eyes were riveted by this:

Damaged as you see in the bombing at the end of WWII, the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtnis (memorial) Kirke (church) was left as a memorial. A modern chapel was built beside it. It's the dark-gray box below the tower to the right, quite ugly from outside, but inside:

We plan to come back here Saturday for an organ recital.