Another busy day

Another morning and another trip to Balzac! And this morning it served as our gateway to the Dom Cathedral.  It was a little cool and damp, but a nice walk non-the-less.  We did take a bit of an unintentional detour on our way there, but saw some nice sights.  Especially while crossing a couple bridges over the river.  As we approached "a" dome, we quickly realized that the dome we were seeing was in fact a synagogue.  It wasn't too far off from our original destination though and we quickly made it to the Dom we were looking for.

The Dom Cathedral was quite beautiful and large inside.  While exploring in interior, we were serenaded by the huge pip organ.  Thanks to the Rick Steves book that Kirstyn had, we knew that we could walk up the stairs and tour the upper area and a small museum.  The book also told us that there were over 300 steps we had to climb to get to the top which almost deterred us from the ascent.  After a quick back-and-forth we wisely decided to make the climb.

Upon nearing the top, there was a brief stop a the base of the dome on while still inside, which provided and nice view of the inside up high.  The real reward occurred a little later after we got to the top of the outside and were able to walk around the exterior of the dome.  This provided us an extremely chilly yet stunning 360 degree view of Berlin.

As we exited the cathedral we made our way to the Deutsches museum, aka, the German History museum.  As soon as you enter you are treated to a fairly large relief map on a floor display showing an area including what is now Europe, parts of Asia, and parts of northern Africa.  What made this so cool is that they had a projector above displaying regions overlay-ed on top of the map which changed every few seconds.  What is showed was what people "owned' of the different regions throughout time.  Very, very interesting!

The rest of the museum was cool too, but by the end a bit overwhelming!  I found the medieval armor and weapons very fascinating... especially how small the sets of armor were!  I know that the men that wore them were fairly young, but i also think it shows how much smaller people were back then too.  Another particularly interesting display was a mask that we both thought looked like a Tuscan Raider (aka, "Sandperson") mask from Star Wars.  Apparently, it was a mask used by doctors who were treating plague at the time.  The mask has an odd "beak-shaped-nose" that would contain vinegar soaked rags to allow the doctor to breath cleansed air.

A little past the halfway point we stopped and got lunch.  The nice part here is that I was able to get a good Pauliner beer and some white veal brats!  Yum!  Again, not nearly as good as in Munich, but still filled a food void I've had since then.  After lunch we were both getting a little tired and perhaps a bit overwhelmed at the breadth of the museum.  So we picked up the pace a bit for the remainder and made our to our next attraction.

Once at the Brandenburg Gate we saw the start of the setup for the unity day festival.  This turned out to be a great place to grab some more authentic German sausages, that were pretty close to what we got in Munich!  The festival was small in comparison to Oktoberfest, but still covered a lot of ground.  As we continued on, rain started to come down fairly heavy.  We switched to walking on a nearby park path that  paralleled our planned route for the most part.  Our hope was to get a little bit of cover thanks to the trees.  This worked fairly well and although wet, we made it to the Victory Column.  At last, we were closing in on the train station too, which would keep us dry on the last leg of our sightseeing adventures for the day.

Our last stop of today's self tour was to see the remains of a cathedral that was bombed out during the war.  The decision was made to leave it "as is" after the war as a reminder of what happened.  It was pretty unreal to see.  The little bit of the interior that is standing and open for people to visit had pictures and models of what the cathedral looked like both before and after the bombings.

Today was a long day of  walking around so we took an easy route of heading back the indo-fusion place for dinner.  After a quick stop there we went back to the hotel room to relax a back and watch a movie.