Basking in Berlin Culture
Trip Start
Apr 18, 2011
1
13
14
Trip End
May 03, 2011
Where I stayed
What I did
Pergamnmuseum
Berlin, Germany
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Woke up at 730am this morning and went to the Hauptbanhof Station to look for food and in the end decided to eat Burger King. I ordered the "Breakfast Burger" while Dawn ordered the "Bacon & Scrambled Egg" which looked super miserable in porpotions!
As today was 1st May, Labour Day, there were lots of policemen stationed in the carpark at the Hauptbanhof.
We took a train to Portsdam so that we could pay a visit to Sanssouci Schloss. OMG!! The park itself was massive & endless!!! I wondered if people got lost in the park before!? We didn't visit the interior of the palace because we thought we had enough of palaces! Furthermore, the interior should be roughly the same, since there's only 1 family who controlled the German empire in the past.
We wandered around the palace surroundings before ending up at Neus Theatre, as our legs were like breaking apart from all this walking! We noticed a parking lot and walked towards the direction to take bus number 695 to the S. Hauptbanhof to take the train back to the city area.
Lunch was at KFC at Alexanderplatz. We ordered the Kombi Box Set which included 1 piece of chicken, 3 hot wings, 2 chicken strips, 1 coleslaw, 1 medium fries & 1 drink. PHEW! That was rather filling!
After lunch, we took the S Bahn to Hackescher Markt Station, and from there, we walked to Museum Island.
We decided to visit Pergamon Museum as the guide book highly recommended it. We paid EUR12 for the entrance ticket, and was sucked into the ancient world of Greek history. The Pergamon Altar is a monument construction from a 2nd Century B.C. Greek temple which depicts a war between the gods and the devils. We took the '30mins highlights tour' as dictated by the audio guide and walked towards the "Hellenistic & Roman Artefacts" before moving to the Ishtar Gate. The Babylonian Ishtar Gate is made of glazed blue tiles from the 6th Century B.C.
We moved to the Islamic Collection on the second floor and made our way to visit a temporary - exhibit on Tell Halaf. Tell Halaf is an archaeological site in Syria, and was the first of a Neolithic culture. There were quite a lot of artefacts that were on display, one of which was the very big bird. By the time we finished looking at this Tell Halaf exhibition, it was almost 6pm!
We continued to walk past the beautiful Berlin Cathedral (which is a century-old church in Museum Island), and came upon this cute shop - Ampelmann (http://www.ampelmann.de/html/geschichte_english.html).
The concept behind the Ampelmann was quite cute and they have developed a wide range of merchandise to celebrate the birth of this East German pedestrian traffic light symbol (back in 1961). I spent a bomb at this store where I bought a dairy, 2 keychains (red & green man), 2 postcards, 1 bookmark and 1 T-shirt.
When we were outside the store, we realised a 'map' and found out that there's an Ampelmann Restaurant where we could visit tonight for dinner!
Before dinner, we headed to the East Berlin Gallery where 1.3km of the Berlin Wall was still preserved but highly decorated by artists. The location of this East Berlin Gallery could be quite 'obscure'. We managed to find it by trying to look at "O2 Water Stadium", which was siutated directly opposite the East Berlin Gallery.
There's actually a souvenir shop whereby they will stamp your passport with the "Berlin Wall Stamp" but when we were there, the shop was already closed... There's also a rather interesting Boat Hostel parked near the East Berlin Gallery - http://www.eastern-comfort.com/
Aftter completing the full 1.3km of the East Berlin Gallery, we ended up at Warschauer St!!! We actually walked the distance of 1 train station - from Ostbanhof to Warschaer St! We walked towards the station and took a train back to Hackescher Markt in search of the AmpelMann Restaurant.
Brrrrrrr.... its so cold..........
Luckily the restaurant was quite easy to locate. The ambience was nice, but there're not a lot of people eating there. We ordered a Wiener Schnitzel, Roast Pork, 2 glasses of wine and tiramisu for dessert. Spent EUR42.40 here but the food was rather forgettable.
Sigh... tonight is our last night in Berlin. Our holidays are coming to an end and its back to reality!
