Auf Wiedersend Berlin

Day 12 (Friday 6th July)

Got up this morning and updatred the blog for the first time in days. Checked out of the hotel at 11am and headed out to Schlessinger Tor to visit the East Side Gallery. This is the longest remaining strech of the Berlin Wall, and was painted with murals by artists from all over the world. That was back in 2000, and many of of the murals have long since faded, but some are still visible. I was disappointed that so many had been vandalised and covered in graffiti, but I did find one exception. The original mural was just a plain background with some coloured handprints. Instead of the usual grafiti people have taken to adding their hand prints to the wall. So in a real sense it has become a living artwork, constantly changing yet retaining it's original concept. I really like that idea. I normally hate grafiti, but in this case I decided to leave my mark on history too.

After the gallery I walked across the adjacent bridge. It is an old finished stone bridge that has been there for hundreds of years. Anna and Julia explained to me the other night that when the wall up the east germans tore down the centre of the bridge and dropped the stones in the river. The bridge was rebuilt almost immediately after the opening of the wall, and has become a very concrete symbol of the reunification.

From there I went to a pedestrian mall called the new promenade and had a quiet beer in the first real summer sun we've had since I got here. But it only lasted about 45 minutes and then I started walking towards Friedrichstrasse. Along the way I spotted a big green dome, which turned out to be called the Berlin Dome, and is the roof of the Cathedral. You can climb up a lot of stairs to a open air gallery at the base of the dome, which has terrific views over the surrounding area.

I continued on towards Freidrichstrasse through the Museum Instel (Museum Island). After spending half a day in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and another halfday in the Van Gogh museum, and nowing I will spend at least that long in the loeuvre when I hit Paris, I made a conscious decision not to do the galleries and museums in Germany, but in hindsight I'm a little sorry I did. I didn't particularly want to see their paintings, but their museums have huge Egyptian, Greek and Middle East collections that I wish I'd seen. Of course I came to this realisation as the musuems were closing for the day on my last day in Berlin. Oops.

I'm sitting in the courtyard underneath the Sony Centre as I type this. I came here because it is supposed to have a free wireless internet connection which I was going to use to post this. Unfortunately whilst the laptop says it's connected to the network, the web browser can't access the net. So I'm not sure when I'll actually be able to post this. It's 7.40pm now, and I'll have to leave here about 8pm as I've got to get the subway back to the main Hauptbahnhof and catch the overnight train to Paris just after 9pm.

Auf Weidersend.

As soon as I finished typing that I tried the net one more time and this time it worked. So here it is.