Berlin (Part 2)

Day 3.

Saturday was more laid back than the previous two days, with our first large chunk of free time during the day. After Prof. Hornfeck's Circuits class finished in the hotel, Rob and I organized an excursion to Alexander Platz, where there are multiple malls, large shopping centers, and department stores. This was not exactly what we were looking for, so we broke off from the pack of Lafayetties and doubled back to the famous street Unter den Linden (comparable to what Champs Ellysees is in Paris, but not as big), which translates to "under the lime trees." After some shopping, almost getting hit by a train, and having a nice sprint back to the hotel, we got on the bus with the rest of the group just in time.
In the afternoon, we got a choice of three museums to visit on "Museum Island," The German Historical Museum, the Pergamonmuseum, or the Jewish History Museum. I would have liked to go to all three, as they all sounded amazing, but settled with the Pergamonmuseum in the end. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, I knew it was a collection of ancient artifacts, and suspected a bunch of glass cases with old relics in them. Boy was I wrong! As you can see from the pictures, the Pergamonmuseum featured entire rooms set up to give you the appearance of being in an ancient civilization, surrounded by real monumental structures straight from their excavation sites at Babylon, Assur, Uruk, Miletus, Egypt, and Priene. This experience was probably one of my favorite throughout the entire trip. While not quite as impressive, the museum also featured a seciton on islamic art, a middle eastern museum, and an antiquity collection filled with statues from all over the world.
We proceded to eat dinner in Kreuzberg, finding a nice Turkish restaurant, where i had 3 turkish pizzas (delicious) and Ayran (turkish yogurt drink, it was kindof like drinking cottage cheese). We concluded the evening at the English Theater Berlin, with a showing of The Extremists, which was a "labyrinth of wordplay and mind games in which a television talk show host and his guest who wrote a book about terrorism get lost in their own doublespeak." It was essentially a witty 2 hour conversation, with one player occasionally forgetting his lines, and me occasionally forgetting to keep my eyes open.

Day 4.

We continued our guided tour of Berlin, seeing Checkpoint Charlie, the Autobahn grandstands, the Olympic Stadium, and examples of Nazi architecture, then drove to Potsdam to see the castle Ceclinienhof (doesn't that roof look like a face? creepy) and castle Sanssouci. One thing of note about Sansoucci; the ruins you see on top of the hill are actually fakes, built so that the castle would have a nice view. Exhausted, we arrived back at Jacob's that evening.