Prague Journal

Tuesday, March 1, 2005.

We had a moderately early breakfast before congregating in the lobby for a tour of “Berlin’s Best,” with Nick Rutter, a recent Brown University graduate, as our guide. Little did we know that Nick would be the best tour guide we could possibly have! Nick taught history in New York before starting his Fulbright in Berlin this fall, and will start his graduate studies at Yale next fall. The tour was scheduled to be a 3-4 hour tour, after which we intended to go to a workshop on Migration at 2pm at the hotel. Instead, we walked through the streets of east Berlin, enthralled with Nick’s descriptions and explanations, for over five hours. We learned about Berlin (and German) history, the city’s political, social and architectural legacy, from Potsdamer Platz, to Museum Island, the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, and along part of the Berlin Wall to Checkpoint Charlie. After the tour, we went back to the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament and one of Berlin’s most historical landmarks, and walked up into the new glass dome. After the unification and the decision to move the Bundestag from Bonn back to Berlin, a new dome was commissioned to replace the central dome of the building that had destroyed during the war and partially restored during 1958 and 1972. This latest reconstruction, completed in 1999, is a glass dome over the plenary hall, designed by Sir Norman Foster, which is now one of the primary tourist attractions of Berlin. A glass panel in the dome allows visitors to view down into the parliamentary chamber beneath. Two spiraling ramps allows visitors to walk to the top for great views of the city. http://germany.archiseek.com/brandenburg/berlin/reichstag.html
We got back to the hotel in time for our next scheduled tour at 4pm, but decided to stay inside, since it was very cold and had been snowing most of the day. Instead, we spent most of the time getting warm and relaxing before dinner.

posted by JWinn @ 10:00 PM