Pictures from Prague: Berlin Day 2

The second (and last) day of my Berlin trip started early. Kate and I got up around 8 and were out the door by 9. Our first stop of the day was at the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall which has been turned into a public art space. Getting there was an adventure. It turned out the metro line we needed to transfer to was closed for two weeks, so we had to backtrack and get there another way. While doing this, we were stopped by someone from the transit authority who informed us that our reduced price student tickets were actually only for people from ages 5 to 17 so we had to get off the metro and buy new tickets. At least we didn't get a fine! The man was very patient, and we didn't bother to tell him we'd been traveling with the same reduced ticket the day before.

After the gallery, we headed back to the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate to get some pictures we hadn't gotten the day before when Kate was in desperate need of socks. This was followed by breakfast. Finally around 1 pm we made it to the zoo. The Berlin Zoo is famously large, and exploring it in the sort-of rain was amazing. On a primatology note, they have representatives of all 4 species of Great Apes--chimpanzees, gorillas, chimpanzees, and gibbons. Pretty cool.

Next, we headed over to Charlottenburg Schloss, which is a pretty huge baroque castle in the Berlin city limits. We opted not to go inside since we'd bought a three day pass to all of the museums in Berlin and intended to make good use of it. The main two museums we wanted to go to were the Gemaldegalerie and the Neue National Museum. The Gemaldegalerie was good; I was even able to find a painting that I could write about for my next art and architecture paper. Unfortunately, when we walked over to the Neue National Museum, it turned out that they were closed for "reinstallation" until April. At this point, it was past 5 pm and all of the other museums were closed. And it was raining. We ended up going to see Marley and Me. The movie was chosen not because we desperately wanted to see it, but because it was dubbed in German with no English subtitles and we figured it would be the easiest to understand without understanding any of the words. We were correct.

We ended up the evening with dinner at our Mexican food restaurant we'd tried to go to the day before. It was definitely worth the return trip. However, Sunday night was a big night for them and it took us an hour and ten minutes to get our food. You didn't think things would go smoothly did you? After dinner, we had just enough time to go back to the Pfefferbett and get our stuff out of our lockers and head to the bus station to catch our night bus back to Prague. Sleep came a little easier this time around on the bus which arrived in Prague at 5 am, just in time for the metro to start running in the morning and take us home.