We woke up at 9 am and it took us about 1.5 hours to get ready, because we weren't in too much of a hurry. We took a regional train to Ostbahnhof and walked over to the East Side Gallery. It's an international memorial for freedom, in the form of a long (1.3 km, according to the Wikipedia page) chunk of the Berlin wall with paintings on it. For some reason, I thought that it would be indoors (the word "gallery" confused me), but it wasn't. Not that I was disappointed or anything, just not what I expected. We walked all along the wall and took pictures of the pieces we liked. Some were really cool, here are some examples:
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| Pinky photobombed Einstein. |
We got to the end and turned back. We noticed some sand sculptures behind a fence and came closer - it was some sort of an exhibition called Sandsation, but it had an admission fee of 5€, and we weren't interested enough to pay that. We had a Cuba Libre break at a small beach bar, which was pretty much deserted because the weather wasn't very good. We got back to the Ostbahnhof train station and after figuring out which S-Bahns we needed to take and where to change, we went to the Charlottenburg castle. We didn't have the time to go inside, so just strolled outside in the gardens. Something for the next time, perhaps.
We made our way over to Potsdam and wandered around a park there. Walked past a large church (Nikolai church, I think) that Pinky said she'd never seen in her life, even though she's visited Potsdam several times. I don't know how that's possible :D We took a walk through the city, which seemed quite cozy.
At 6 pm we met up with our hostess and a girl that was also staying at their place. The four of us went to Babelsberg, and had dinner at an Italian restaurant. I ordered a risotto ai frutti di mare, and it had octopus in it, which was a new experience for me. After dinner our hostess took us on a tour around Babelsberg and showed some landmarks, like the house that Harry Truman stayed at when he signed the order for the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also a memorial to the victims that died in the bombings. Behind the house was the river along which the Berlin wall used to go. Then we walked to Berliner Strasse - the set of the movie Pianist. Apparently quite a few famous movies, such as Inglorious Basterds, were filmed at the local movie studio (see Wikipedia article here).
It had been another long day full of walking, so by the time we got back to our accommodation we were once again deadly tired.
-Brain
-Brain
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