Berlin

Hello all!

Greetings from Amsterdam. My apolgoies for the neglect over these first couple of weeks. It has been busy! I've just arrived back here after four days in Berlin. What an incredible city! We took the 6 and a half hour tarin journey early Saturday morning arriving around 1:30 in the afternoon. After receiving directions to our hostel from the circle of police officers, we arrived at our place in the busy Mitte downtown district, which was in East Berlin 20 years ago, and set off to explore. We headed down the river and immediately discovered Museum Island, which houses the National Art Gallery, the Pergamon museum of the art of antiquity, among others. The buildings together are a humbling site of grandeur, with the enormous neo-classical columns and statues atop the builings. They were surrounded by constuction, as they are still repairing the buildings since the fall of the wall.

We moved along past the Berlin Dome- the ornate catherdral with shining gold and copper domes to Alexanderplatz, the site of the TV Tower, a tall CN-Tower-like structure but with a metal ball as the restaurant part that is visible from everywhere in the city. The square also hosts the fountain of Neptune, what I thought was a dark portrayal of the God of the Sea with snakes and mermaids. We continued made our way along a main street called Uder den Linden, which is lined with museums, embasseys, the opera house, a memorial to the victims of war, culminating in the Brandenburg gate. The gate to the city was built in the late 1700's, and the sanstond stucture topped with horses and a charriot is the city's landmark.