After taking it quite easily on Sunday we decided to go shopping on Monday. We started of here in Charlottenburg with a couple of shops after which we spent a couple of hours having a look at the Pergamon museum. It was very interesting to look at all the huge pieces of walls and gates from different countries, I couldn't but wonder how they'd got it all into the museum. The museum is situated on the Museum Island and it is the newest one of the museums on the island. It was designed by Ludwig Hoffmann and Alfred Messel and build in thirty years from 1910 to 1930. The Pergamon houses original-sized reconstructed monumental buildings such as the Pergamon altar, the Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate, all consisting of parts transported from Turkey. The museum is subdivided into the antiquity collection, the Middle East museum, and the museum of Islamic art and visited by approximately 850,000 people every year, making it the most visited art museum in Germany. It was all very impressive and interesting, at least the buildings and the miniature models. I don't find all the artefacts that great, but I love the miniatures. I find it very interesting to see how the cities looked like and I like to imagine what the life was like. It was the first time for me to see original-sized models though, and I really was full of awe!
Back to shopping, my mum said that she needed a new dress for her goddaughters confirmation ceremony, so we headed to Friedrichstrasse/Hackescher Markt to raid the shops. Since I know my mothers style quite well, I only took her to some chosen shops, and not quite unexpectedly she found some nice things at one of my favourite shops, Mango. The fact that everything was reduced didn't make things worse... After quite the exhausting and long day of shopping we were quite hungry and headed to Alexanderplatz to look for a restaurant. I had planned to introduce my mother to the wonders of the German speciality curry sausage, but I couldn't find a good place, so we decided to have dinner at a italian restaurant just next to the Fernsehturm. It was called Linosa's and it was really worth the search. The food was amazing and the service too. After finishing dinner with an apfelstrudel and fresh strawberries with mascarpone we headed to the tower. The weather was a bit cloudy, but the view was still wonderful! Up there I realized my orientation was a bit wrong, I found that the distance between some place was shorter that I had thought. I like it very much to see a city from above, because that way it's easier to get a good picture of where everything is. Especially in Berlin, the huge city that it is, where you mostly travel underground with the metro and just come up wherever. It's difficult to get the bigger picture that way. Just like I said earlier about the miniature models that I like so much: it's for the same reason. While in the tower it started getting dark and on the way home we stopped at the Brandenburg Gate, which looked beautiful in the dark with all the lights.
Having dinner at Linosa's
On Tuesday we decided to take it a bit easier again, so we headed to the zoo. At the hippo and nyala pen we had an interesting experience. The hippo came out of the water, started chasing the baby nyalas, which didn't make the daddy nyala very happy. He started chasing the hippo and pushed him forward with his horns. It was a very funny situation and quite a lot people gathered around. The zoo also had lion cubs and they were so cute! We came to the wildcat house just in time for the feeding and the big lions were walking around nervously waiting for their food. My favourite animal was although not the lion cubs but the siberian ibex goats. They are mountain habitats and very agile and hardy, able to climb on bare rock and survive on sparse vegetation. I could have watched them all day jumping up the steep rocks. It was amazing how even the babys just jumped around on the high rocks without any trouble.
The nyala was protecting his kids from the mean mean hippo
A bear enjoying the sun
The pelican was very social and probably would
have bitten me if I had given him my hand
have bitten me if I had given him my hand
For Wednesday we had planned to go to Potsdam to see the park Sanssouci, and we were a bit worried that I would rain. We had luck though, the weather was fantastic and we enjoyed a beautiful day in the most amazing park. We started of the with the Neues Palais, which is a palace in the western end of the park. The building was begun in 1763, after the end of the Seven Years War under the reign of Frederick the Great and it was completed in 1769. For the King, the New Palace was not a principal residence, but a display for the reception of important royals and dignitaries. Of the over 200 rooms, four principal gathering rooms and a theater were available for royal functions, balls and state occasions. During his occasional stays at the palace, Frederick occupied a suite of rooms at the southern end of the building, composed of two antechambers, a study, a concert room, a dining salon and a bedroom, among others. The palace was the most amazing building I've ever seen I again I imagined what it would've been like to live, or even visit there. The walls of the hall in the ground floor was covered in shells formed in shapes of see animals and it was the most glorious room I've ever seen. The rooms were decorated mostly in rococo style, which actually wasn't fashionable anymore at that time, but due to the king's admiration of this style. On the second floor there was a 600 sqare metre dancing hall with a 240 square metre painting in the ceiling. The park itself is huge, 289 ha and there are many buildings including the Neptune Grotto, the Antique Temple, the Orangerie Palace and many more. Back in Berlin we went to have dinner at a Greek Restaurant. We took a surprise platter which was huge, and we were so full afterwards that we could have rolled home.
The chinese tea house in Park Sanssouci
The view upon Potsdam from the tower of the Orangerie Palace
The last day was Thursday and we decided to do some more shopping. We went to Kurfürstendamm walked around a bit, went to see the old and the new church, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and had a look at KaDeWe. In the evening we had dinner reservation at a restaurant called Lutter & Wegner seit 1811. It is a historical restaurant in southern Charlottenburg that started as a wine store. In 1851 Lutter & Wegner was appointed as the royal supplier of wines and later the store was a popular meeting place for artists like Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker. During the war the shop was destroyed and after the war they opened a new shop that later developed into a restaurant. Through its history Lutter & Wegner has become a cult and it is an experience to have dinner there. We started of with a soup and a salad, the main course was schnitzel with potatoe salad and as dessert we had creme brûlee. All very delicious. If you want to have good food in a traditional atmosphere, I can really recommend this restaurant.
Having cake an tea at the dutch quarter in Potsdam
Some dutch style houses in Potsdam
When my mother left for the airport on Friday morning I went to work, thinking that I'd sleep all weekend. In the evening I still decided to go to a party with my flat mate and her husband. It was good fun and I met some nice people. On Saturday I went to see the exhibitions of Helmut Newton and Abisag Tüllmann. Helmut Newton was a fashion photographer who raised a lot of controversial feelings with his provocative erotic pictures. He changed the field of fashion photography and got to shoot for Vogue, YSL, Playboy and other large publications and fashion designers. Abisag Tüllman on the other hand was a photojournalist and theatre photographer who took pictures at demonstrations, political events and theatre plays. I found the pictures of Tüllmann more interesting because of the news value, but then again all the beautiful colours of Newtons polaroid pictures were very fascinating.
Yesterday night I had another first one: my first night out in Berlin. We started of at a cocktail bar with some of Matts friends and went to a couple of clubs finally ending up at Graues Kloster. We got home at 5.30 in the morning, but it was a great night! Next weekend will be great as well, I'm going to visit a friend in Vienna... Til then...
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