Finally we arrived at the Natural History museum. It was interesting. There were a lot of really cool exhibits. Here are some of the pictures:
There were a lot of really neat exhibits. The only thing that I did not really like about this museum was that the staff could not speak English. I asked them a simple question, and without even a word about how they couldn't understand, the first staff member directed me to another staff member, who completely misunderstood my question. I also noticed that not a lot of the exhibits had English translations. You would think for a national museum, that they would at least accommodate the tourists a little. I mean a lot of the world speaks English, so the language that most of the tourists are going to use to communicate would be English. I guess I thought it was a bit weird.
Moving on from there, we decided to get some good German food. We had been in Germany for a while, and had not had German food yet. By the time we had gotten out of there it was about lunch time anyways. So we went to another place that the book recommended. This one was a bit of a splurge, but it was TOTALLY worth it. It was DELICIOUS. Here are some pictures of the food that we had:
After all that delicious food, it was time to move on to more museums. We wanted to visit some of the more classic museums in Berlin. So we headed to museum island again. We had been there the night before, and wound up getting the museum card that got us into 60 different museums in Berlin for one price. Which was handy, because had we just gotten tickets to each one, it would have cost us more than the price of the one ticket by quite a lot. We took a lot of pictures from the last three museums that we visited. (Alte Nationalgalerie, Pergamon Museum, and Neues Museum) All three were on museum island. I could not tell you which museum housed which statues. The Alte Nationalgalerie however is the only one out of the three that had paintings. So here are the pictures of the way to the museums, and the pictures from the museums:
After hitting all the museums, we hit up another site that is on museum island, Berliner dome. Now the pictures definitely do not do it justice. It is huge, and magnificent. It's definitely a site to see. Here are some of the pictures of that. We couldn't take pictures of the inside, because they were rehearsing for mass. and, I did not climb to the tower, but Anton did.
After that we went to the Reichstag, which we were disappointed to find out that we were not allowed to enter, because we did not make reservations saying that we would be going, in advance. We were unaware that we had to do that. Now we know for future reference to make reservations. After being a bit disappointed about not being able to go up there, we decided to call it a night. Especially seeing as earlier in the morning we had found out that the workers of the U-bahn were going on strike at 4am, which was the time that we were planning on leaving.
So we had to leave to get to the airport at 2am. We took the U-bahn. Which was very confusing, because at first we were under the impression that we would have to take a replacement bus. Well, that's only on the weekdays between certain hours. So we finally got on the train, took it to where we were supposed to be able to catch a bus to the airport... only to find out that it didn't start running until 4am, and that it was not running then due to the strikes. After talking to some security guards we finally figured out that the only way to get to the airport at that point was a taxi. Now we were trying to avoid taking a taxi, because we had heard that it was expensive. but we were close enough that it was not too bad. It was still not as cheap as the bus. but it was better than nothing.
Finally after an exhausting morning, we were at the airport. We talked for a LONG time until we decided to get breakfast with our leftover Euros. and after breakfast it was time to go through security, and head home. I think it was interesting though, how they ran things at this airport. We had no idea where our gate to get on the plane was at, so once through security we had to sit in a hallway for a couple of hours while waiting to see where our gate is, but instead of telling us where it was before boarding time, it told us instantly that we were boarding. It was a bit confusing. something that I thought was different about planes here is they board using the stairs, not directly into the building. I am sure that there are some that do, but the ones that we had to and from Berlin all boarded outside. It was overall an amazing trip. One that I will remember for the rest of my life.
One last thing that I thought was interesting, because I don't know where I was supposed to put this but Berlin had a lot of casinos. within the 10 min bus ride we had on our way to the hotel we saw 9 casinos, and as we were walking the city we found more. I just thought it was interesting. I had so much fun. I cant wait to go on another trip.
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