Last full day in Berlin and of vacation!

The morning's goal was to go to see the Reichstag.   We started off with our traditional stop to Balzac to get coffee and breakfast along the way.  As we walked to the government building, we passed by the Brandenburg Gate again and were in for a treat.  Because of the Unity festival going on, there was an visiting performance by a French Marionette group named Royal de Luxe.  This was amazing to see.  The marionettes were over 20 feet tall and took cranes and mass groups of people to work them.  Our first pass by them, they were still "sleeping" from the previous night (meaning the performance for the day hadn't started yet).  So we progressed onto our original morning destination.

We got to the Reichstag basically early enough to avoid the mass crowds.  We still had to wait a little bit, but it could have been a lot worse.  Security was extremely tight, but we finally got in and could ascend to the top.  Much like the dom cathedral, there were amazing 360 degree views from up top.  Once up there we also decided to wait around a bit to see if we could get a good view of the marionettes from the nice height. Unfortunately, they weren't quite moving for us yet, so we decided to move on ourselves.

On our way back to the hotel we stopped along some shops and did a little last minute shopping.  This was a good choice though because I was finally able to find a stein that liked.  I wasn't quite sure if I was going to pick one up or not on the trip, but luckily Kirstyn was nice enough to convince me to do it :) 

Our last tourist stop was one of the coolest of the trip.  We went on a tour of a German FLAC tower from WWII.  This tower was the blown up remains of a fortress that the Germans used to shoot at Allied aircraft during the war.  After Berlin was taken, the towers were blown up in a controlled manner... or at least attempted to be blown up.  The tower we toured was about half left standing and the interior was a twisted mess of huge concrete slabs, re-bar, missing floors, and mounds of rubble.  The tour was fantastic and unbelievably interesting.  It was a great way to finish out our tours from the trip.

Now that all the sightseeing was gone, I was set on finally seeing a Bears game over seas.  And thought I had my answer when I found a bar called Belushi's!  What could go wrong??  Well, we finally found the bar but the Bears game wasn't televised.  Once again, they didn't make international prime time.  So, not wanting to finish our trip eating crappy bar food without a good reason, we decided to make our way back to Sophia's.  The funny thing was that we ran into Frelgy and Cristina there too!  We were both thinking the same thing.  And it was just as good as our first trip there and this time we even tacked on a phenomenal dessert too... homemade German apple strudel... yum