Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

Yay! Saturday! After Friday’s activities, we were all set for another fun filled day. Saturday was our big museum day. We got up and had some yummy breakfast, then took off for the museum island. Yeah, they have a little island covered with museums.

We went down to the subway station and Ben tried to interview Mike. I wouldn’t have any of that though.

We hopped on the subway and headed to Alexander Platz. This also happens to be the home of the tallest building in Berlin, so we took a picture of that.

We’ll cover that more later. Random picture of us!

Alexander Platz is a pretty happening place. It’s a major transportation hub (we actually changed from the train to subway there when we arrived) and it’s got a few major tourist things, so there are always quite a few people running around. And where there’s people, there’s crazy vendors wearing grills selling sausage!

After getting through Alexander Platz, we hopped a bus a few stops to the museums. The second we got off we saw the Berlin Cathedral.

It took a few minutes to get oriented, but soon we were on our way to the Pergamon Museum, the first stop of the day. Ben was in full “record mode” at this point.

The Pergamon is a little crazy in that it takes up pretty much an entire small island. Being an island gives it an interesting look, even before you see what’s inside!

The guts of it are… big. The first room you enter is a reproduction of a large temple. It’s pretty impressive. And all the rooms are that big. This isn’t even the big room:

We broke off into a couple of groups to explore the museum. After a bit I spotted the other group:

They spotted me too, but I was a little better hidden.

There was one thing about the museum that I wasn’t a fan of. When we went in, the guard told me I’d have to put my backpack in a locker. I didn’t really see the point, but I did. It really irritated me for some reason. I guess I saw tons of people going in with purses and I don’t understand what the difference is. I saw plenty of purses that were larger than backpacks, so it wasn’t a size thing. At any rate, after walking through the whole museum, I start seeing this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And four more I didn’t take pictures of. If there’s anything I hate more than a stupid policy, it’s a stupid policy that’s not even enforced consistently. And as long as I’m on the topic, all museums are like this in Berlin. I was even told at one museum that I couldn’t be on the steps leading up to the museum entrance with a backpack. It wasn’t the outdoors steps, but ones inside leading to the museum door. Long story short, don’t have a backpack in Berlin. Bring a purse, they seem to be allowed anywhere.

And yes, I’m directing that at you guys too.

Moving on with the day…

We got tickets to the Egyptian museum along with the Pergamon, so at about 1:30 we wandered around the corner to the Egyptian museum. We grabbed some big pretzels as lunch. Before we could go into the second museum though, we had to wait for Joni to finish her pretzel.

They had all kinds of Egyptian stuff on the bottom floor, but then the upper floors were just general human history from Neanderthals to Romans. It was pretty neat. There were some oddities though. You can’t lean against the new pillars in the basement for some reason (so no backpacks and no leaning I guess) and they had this weird dichotomy where they had fancy new display cases for everything:

but then their actual building was a little run down. It was odd. You’d think the museum would “museum-fy” itself first.

By that time it was getting a little late, so we hopped the bus back to Alexander Platz. We grabbed a quick snack, then decided to do a little shopping. Ben was enjoying having an entourage.

During our shopping, I found the cutest orange socks. Here’s me wearing them a little later in the day:

We also saw the best ad ever.

Or if you don’t want to watch the video, this sums it up:

Once our shopping was done, we hopped back to the apartment quick. Ben had wanted to see some sort of cabaret while in Berlin. Marlena had suggested a variety show, so we decided to head down there and see if we could get tickets. The subway next to the apartment went straight down there, so it was pretty easy.

As we were walking up to the theatre, I had to take a minute to get a picture of this sign.

Yeah, “Der Friseur” means “The Hairdresser” in German. Teehee.

We got to the theatre only to find out that they couldn’t seat all of us together that night. We opted to just skip it for the evening and get tickets for the next day. We had been planning on eating at the theatre that night, but with that no longer being an option, we asked the ticket booth lady for a good place to eat. She gave us directions, so we set off to catch the bus. We fortunately saw it sitting at a stop. We just barely missed it, but we managed to catch the next one.

Evening update, courtesy of The Zipline Show

We got to where we thought she had directed us, only to find nothing. It was supposed to be a veritable promised land of eateries, but we found apartments and a small Italian place. Turns out that there’s a street and a square with the same name. We went to the street, we needed to be at the square. We just hopped back on the bus, went a little further, and we were there.

We found a great place, but they were packed. Then we found another place, but they were packed. Fast forward 20 minutes and we had seen a ton of places… all packed. Well, giving up, we returned to the apartment to buy and make food. We ended up getting hamburgers and a bunch of drinks. The rest of the night was spent playing cards and playing with the toys we got in our Kinder Surprise Eggs from shopping earlier:

We had a good time, but we eventually had to go to bed. Make sure to see what we did on Day 4.