Day 3: Berlin

It's quite an experience being awoken by the alarm clock, looking up at the ceiling, and seeing a floor. With a chair on it. The night was uneventful, other than my having to turn off the "ocean noise" atmosphere creator because one of those noises turned out to be the sound of someone ominously walking over wet pebbles toward the listener. Not restful.

After a nice breakfast in our hotel (why don't I ever eat Nutella at home?), we hopped a train to the zoo. It is very nicely laid out, smack in the middle of city life and all--like an ideal version of the Philadelphia Zoo. Lots of good exhibits, especially the trained sea lion show and the aquarium's specialty in jellyfish. According to one placard, "Jellyfish are super organisms," and they seem to believe that, because they have a lot of jellyfish.

Having seen everything in the zoo, we walked by the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, left in a damaged state from Allied bombing as a reminder of the cost of war, and entered KaDeWe, mainland Europe's largest department store. It's quite impressive, especially the 6th floor, which is entirely devoted to gourmet food. I bought some fancy chocolate and we ate at a little Asian food station. I also indulged my new travel habit of buying a copy of Ulysses in the native language of the place I'm visiting. Only disappointment at KaDeWe: the large game selection did not include Blokus.

From there we took a few trains to Unter den Linden, took some pictures of the Brandenburg Gate like good little tourists, then walked to the Holocaust Memorial. My favorite memorial ever. It consists of hundreds of plain concrete columns of varying height that stand on undulating ground. As you walk the lanes between them, you see nothing but concrete columns in every direction, seeming to change size as you go. The idea is to emphasize the banality of evil, and it worked for me. Very powerful, even though my dad as chastened by a security guard for standing on one of the columns to get a good photo.

Next was Potsdamer Platz, a conglomeration of modern architecture in what used to be a dead zone thanks to the Berlin Wall. All I can say is that it looks like what people in the 1950s thought the future would look like, which is satisfying for a modernist like me. After a quick stop at the city library, we headed for a historical exhibit on the former site of SS headquarters. We learned all about the horrors of Nazism, and got to see a stretch of the Wall in its original location. Speaking of the wall, we then went to Checkpoint Charlie, looked at it, and moved on.

We went back to the Unter den Linden area to try to get into the glass dome on the Reichstag, but the line was long and unmoving, and there would have been no daylight by the time we got up there, so we ditched it until tomorrow. Instead, we went to the main train station and walked around its impressive multiple levels of shops, then got my dad his daily sausage (currywurst today) and dragged ourselves back to the hotel. Coming tomorrow: the Reichstag, museums, and more...