Tourist for a Day

December 18, 2014 

Today I had the amazing opportunity to be a tourist again. Since moving here I think sometimes I take the sights for granted. It was also my first time playing tour guide to a new friend. A friend that I met while in Greece came to Berlin for 24 hours and had a day to catch some sights. The first thing we did was meet at the Brandenburg Tor (Tor means Gate in German), It was actually incredible because in all my times to the Brandenburg I have never gotten a good photo with it. We really lucked out because there was a perfect combination of rainy weather, it being 10am and it being on a Thursday - there was really no one around. I actually got a photo with maybe one or two people in the background. Normally at the Brandenburg there are so many people in the background and distractions that it looks so much like a tourist trap. It was really great to get a photo with just the Tor. It is probably one of my favourite photos so far. 

Me and the Brandenburg Tor

The next thing we walked to just around the corner is the Reichstag, again it was amazing because we were nearly the only people there. The Reichstag is the building that houses the German government - The Bundestag - a very pretty building with an amazing dome on top. It is hard to see the dome in this photo but the glass piece on top is actually this amazing dome that you can walk around in and see the entire city from. In my first post with photos from my trip to Berlin in August there are photos taken from inside the dome, and of the dome. 

At the Reichstag

We stopped to take a look at the Column  of Victory before moving on to our stop. 

This is a photo of my friend in the Holocaust Memorial. The memorial is a series of grey blocks of varying height, at the beginning they are an inch tall and then the floor slopes down and the blocks very very tall - the idea is to create a sense of imposing confusion and isolation. It is a very large area. There are many conflicts surrounding the monument because many feel that it was designed poorly and implemented poorly. I like it though. Below are some photos of the memorial that I got on the internet, the photos show just how massive this place is..in the summer we lost a friend in there for a solid 20min. Underneath the site is the Holocaust Museum, a very well done museum I visited in the summer. 

We then made our way over the the Gendarmenmarkt Christmas Market, it was a really spectacular market, there we got curry wurst!! So yummy. We also went to a few other markets and made our way to Alexander Platz. 

Really famous world clock at Alexander Platz, common meeting place for local Berliners. 

After a completely full day of touring (all this took place over around 4 hours!) my friend headed off to the airport to continue his adventure around Europe. It was a really great day and I was really happy about the tour we did, I think it covered some pretty unique things about Berlin and I got to go to a new beautiful christmas market! 

More posts to come as I catch up on the last month's adventures :)