Tour of Berlin and Reichstag

Tuesday

We woke up very early in the morning to board the train back to the London airport. After a brief delay, we left on our flight to Berlin. We have had a spectacular time in London, and it is hard to say goodbye after such a short week. Still, it is great to look forward to the adventures to come in Germany. The flight was great, but we had a missed approach on final because somebody, not one of us, was in the lavatory.
Settling into Berlin, the Hostel is quite different than in England. The city feels different as well. It is immediately apparent that the city feels more industrial. Almost all of the surfaces have graffiti on them, damage from the war is much more apparent, and the climate is much colder at this time of year though I am told it is much warmer than in prior tours. We visited the Pergamon museum with a self guided audio tour then went to the hotel to check in.

Wednesday

The day begins with a tour of the Reichstag. The campus consists of several other buildings which, together, form the parliament of Germany. Entry to the building is heavily guarded, getting in is akin to passing through airport security, complete with heavy interlock doors. Once inside, our guide takes us around to several rooms and talks about the history of the building. There have been several renovation over the years sometimes prompted by fire, other times by political changes. The current building was completed in 1999. The inside is very modern, not something I expected looking in from the outside.
We learned that Germany does not have separation of church and state like we are used to in America. The government still pays taxes to the church, and there is a beautiful prayer room inside the Reichstag which is used regularly for prayers before meetings and is open to anybody who works there.
The parliament floor is filled with purple seats arranged in a special configuration to separate the various political parties. It is surrounded by glass, so members of the press and public can watch without entering. The ceiling is very high and vents directly to the massive glass dome above. From the ground to the top, the dome extends 54 meters. We climbed up to the top and got an impressive view of the city.

After we exited, we met our second tour guide who took us through the city and talked about various significant points. I will save all of the details for a future post, but I will cover a few of the more important things we saw. We first walked through the Brandenburg Gates and discussed the significance behind several historical events that happened there. The gate has seen a lot, and it now is seen as a symbol of the rough history of Germany and Europe as well as peace and unity. The gate used to be on the western edge of Berlin and, during the GDR, was right on the edge of the Berlin wall.
The Berlin wall was another site that we talked about. There are monuments and portions of the wall that remain standing, but it somehow seems more somber to see the red bricks which now run through the city and indicate where the full wall once stood. They go under buildings and across streets.
We finished our tour on museum island, an island in the middle of the city that is home to several museums and historical buildings. After our tour concluded, we went to Fassbender & Rausch, an incredible Schokoladenhaus (chocolate house) which was essentially a gourmet restaurant which only serves things made out of chocolate. I had the most buttery hot cholocate you could imagine with a cappuccino mini torte which is described on the menu as espresso mousse combined with coffee ganache on a dark sponge cake under a layer of white chocolate.