Saturday, September 28, 2019

Wednesday, September 25

Today we headed over to a reconstructed section of the Wall where international artists had been given free reign to present their artistic statements. It’s called the East Side Gallery. It’s been pretty well preserved, i.e. there’s not much graffiti marring the original work. Some of the work has been updated over time. 

We found most of the art to be quite inspirational.





This is a very iconic scene. We had even bought a postcard of it before knowing of its origin.

The woman is real. She added to the picture!






The back side of the wall was left open to the graffiti artists, and they struck with full force.


Does anybody know that person in the upper left?

In the background: The German National Bird 
The construction crane

Berliners have a clever term for everything.


This part of the Wall is on the bank of a river, which was the actual border. Once we got to the end of the Wall, we came across quite a marvelous scene of brick bridges and towers, some of which had featured in the artwork. And we consumed another curry wurst.

Looking up at the back side of the Wall from the river


The amazing Oberbaumbrücke (bridge), along with a floating hotel made up of two anchored boats


Then an uncaptioned walk along the rather funky Skalitzer Straße to a subway stop in a Turkish part of town.













After a brief subway ride and a walk along the river, we were at the Reichstag building with its recently added (post-Wall) glass dome. We had hoped to take a tour on previous visits but the lines were much too long. Seeing no lines this time we thought we must have won, but we learned that now they were using timed tickets, the tickets were gone for today, and they were only available at inconvenient times tomorrow. So, next time we’re in Berlin we will get our tickets on Day One of the visit.




 An Orangina and a beer, some sketching, a walk to the subway station, and back to our hotel.





The Reichstag on the right, and the new Bundestag on the left



At the subway station

Streets in the Bundestag area are named after renowned statesmen. Nearby are two more such streets, named after John Foster Dulles and Yitzhak Rabin.

The day concluded with a very ample dinner at the Black and White Turkish restaurant.
 


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