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Due to many factors (travel, freelance deadlines, etc) I’ve gotten seriously behind on the blogging front. So despite the fact I’m back in the good ole US of A, I’m going to pretend I’m back in Deustchland for blog purposes.

So it’s our last day of touring in Germany, and we start off by walking from Potsdamer Platz down to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe . We’d visited it our first night in Berlin and it was a somewhat different experience during the day. Either way, it’s impossible to get the real impact of the memorial without actually visiting it. You don’t see how tall some of the pillars are actually, because the ground is uneven. I found that walking down in between the pillars was reminiscent of the feeling I got entering the underground gas chambers when I visited Auschwitz.



Right across from the memorial, and next door to the Brandenberg Gate, (talk about prime real estate), they’re building the new U.S. Embassy. I wonder how the government managed to get that particular plot to build on.

From there it was on to the Reichstag, a building steeped with history. The visit inspired my most recent, hate mail inspiring column at the Greenwich Time, which you can read over at saramerica. To me, the Reichstag is a great example of what I loved about Berlin – the juxtaposition between historical and modern.



Sir Norman Foster’s modern reconstruction of the dome destroyed in WWII sits atop the restored building, originally constructed in 1894.



The inscription on the façade, “to the German People” was carved in 1916, much to the displeasure of Kaiser Wilhelm II who didn’t like its democratic significance.



From the roof, you could see the continued reconstruction going on in East Berlin.



Then we strolled down the Unter Den Linden to Museum Island. We went to the Egyptian Museum and saw the famous bust of Nefertiti



The Webmeister and I had a nap on the grass in front of the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral)



and rested our weary selves and tootsies



before hitting the Pergamon Museum, with it’s amazing collection of antiquities.

Afterwards, I invested (too much money, according to the Webmeister, who is trying to teach me how to haggle more effectively) in an official Soviet fuzzy hat with earflaps.

I figure since I’m so often called “an America-hating Communist” by people who don’t like my political column, I might as well have the appropriate headgear.



More to the point, it’ll keep my ears warm during the cold, New England winters. Never mind that when the Webmeister took this pic as I was sitting in the Ubahn station, it was about 90 degrees.

And thus endeth our touring of Berlin, a truly fantabulous city.