After a quick breakfast this morning we caught a bus for Berlin. There were ten of us on the “Berlin On Your Own Tour”. The guide on the bus showed us where the bus would drop us off and pick us up, and helped us with our travel plans. The ship also had several Berlin guided tours, and there were at eight buses for those trips, but we had specific museums we wanted to see that were not part of the organized tour.
The bus left for Berlin at 7:30am, with most of the trip on the autobahn, and arrived about 11:00am. We walked past/through the Holocaust Memorial (photo), to the Brandenburg Gate (photo). The Brandenburg Gate is 200 years old, but was a real fixture of the divided Berlin and the spy movies. There are two rows of bricks down the center of the road in the area that showed where the Berlin wall divided East and West Berlin.
We could see the Reichstag (photo on the left). This was the German parliament building. One night it burned, it is now suspected, on Hitler’s instructions, but he blamed the Jews and it started the prosecution of Jews. We also saw the Berliner Dome (photo), which chimed noon just as we walked past it.
We had to wait on line forty five minutes for tickets to the Museum Island, which has five different museums. Our first stop was the Neues Museum, which houses the Egyptian exhibit. Our goal was to see the bust of Nefertiti, which, with the Rosetta Stone, are the two most famous Egyptian artifacts outside of Egypt. We could not take a picture of the bust, so this is a picture of a postcard of the bust, but the postcard does not do it justice. The bust and Nefertiti are beautiful.
We then went to the Pergamon Museum, which really should not be missed. It is named after the Pergamon Altar (photo below left), which was a Roman altar from a city in Turkey. It is huge. The steps are 95’ wide and 55’ high. Then we saw the market gate of Miletus (photo) from the 2nd century AD. This towering, reconstructed ruin is inside the museum. It was very ornate to show the wealth of the town, and to encourage traders and shoppers to stop. It was also from Turkey, about 100 miles from Ephesus.
Finally, in the back of the museum is the 6th century BC Ishtar Gate (photo), which is Babylonian, from an area that is now Iraq. The tiles are blue glazed with animal tile reliefs decorating the walls.
Finally, on the way back to the ship we stopped for a photo op of the Schloss Charlottenburg palace.
Were now on the three hour bus trip back to our ship. The bus driver bought us all beers to drink on the way, so the time is going fast. Our day in Berlin was wonderful.
All of the buses arrived at the same time, and they held the vast majority of the cruise passengers. We were greeted at the dock with a welcome home sign, the ship band playing lively music and at least 100 members of the crew lining both sides of the carpet clapping in greeting on our return. It was a spectacular greeting.
This weekend turns out to be the weekend for an annual tall ships event. We saw a number of the ships in port when we arrived. This evening a number of smaller vessels were doing a parade up and down the area to crowds on shore and with us having ring side seats.
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