Berlin Part 2

The next day we headed to Pergamon Museum. I'd never heard of it and displayed some reluctance to go but bloody hell it's a cracker. They have transported vast sections of ancient cities and put them back together in this enormous museum. It truly has to be seen to be believed.

 

The Market Gates of Pergamon transported to Berlin

 

Wow!

 

Maja seemed to like it

After that we headed out to the East Side Gallery which is where the Wall has been left and over 100 artists have given it a new lick of paint. 

 

Now this was more the sort of Berlin we were expecting. Grey, Soviet architecture, with vast sweeps of land left derelict and many buildings abandoned. Pretty grim actually. It turns out Prenzlauer Berg is THE gentrified suburb of East Berlin. Speaking of the divide, we had fun working out whether we were in east or West Berlin at the stop signs. East Berlin has a different Green Man for go. A rather dapper looking figure with a hat, and they have left them the same. This figure is called Ampel Man and if the set of lights has Ampel Man you're in the East, if not, you're in the West. Ampel Man has had something of a renaissance in popularity and there is even an Ampel Man shop where you can buy stuff with Ampel Man on it. We bought the mints!

As for the East Side Gallery, strangely it didn't move me so much, Delia on the other hand was very interested and the kids just wanted to go.

So go we did and this time to the Kinder Museum. Another cracker. Now in Melbourne we are lucky enough to have ArtPlay which does wonderful stuff, but it uses organised activities so you can't just nip down. Then there are the indoor playcentres which are plasticky and tacky. Now if you combine the two but instead of plastic use stylish handbuilt wooden stuff you have the general idea of the Kinder Museum. Oh and of course with a cafe. What's not to like?

Fantastic, there was even a suit of armour for kids to put on!

Absolutely brilliant. Berlin rocks.

So we woke up the next day to head back to the station to catch a train to Hamburg and the largest model railway museum in the world but on the way to the station we found another section of the Berlin Wall, this one unaltered and much more moving. They had left one of the machine gun towers and a stretch of no man's land. This one felt very real. The station we went in to was some kind of ghost station with lots of large photos of the empty station and blocked tunnels. In fact we hung around there a bit too long and had to dash to catch the train. 

So we an overwhelming sense of hardly having scratched the surface and that we could happily live in Berlin for a while we hopped on a train to Hamburg.