Our second day in Berlin was depressing museum day.
First stop was the Topography of Terror 
It was an open air museum about the history of the site which was once an arts school but then the head offices of the SS and Gestapo. There was so much information it took us about 2 hours to get through 1/6 of the information. It was really really hot and there is no shelter at the museum so we left with the plan to return after sunset.
We headed towards the Checkpoint Charlie museum, it is a museum that was set up in the apartment overlooking the Berlin wall shortly after the wall was built. The museum has since spread to several buildings. After WW2 Berlin was split up, the west went to the Allies and the East became part of the DDR (Deutshland Democratic Republic) and was controlled by the Soviets. When the division was made over 1 million people escaped from from the DDR to west Berlin. Escapees were given jobs, apartments and passports by the allies. So many people were crossing the border into West Berlin that the Soviets built a wall. There were 2 walls with a section of no mans land in between. This area had land mines, guard dogs and watchtowers every 100m. The wall separated families, siblings, friends and lovers. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum is about the daring escapes people made. There were tunnels, home made aircraft, homemade hot air balloons, daring sprints across the no mans land and people smuggled in speakers, suitcases and even inside the drivers seat of a car!
this is what Checkpoint Charlie looks like now, a death trap for tourists
here you can see what the checkpoint looked like in the 90s.
Afterwards we went back to the Topography of Terror Museum and tried to read as much as we could before they closed. It had a heartbreaking amount of information about the Holocaust. Reading what occured in the SS offices just made me sick, it was horrible and depressing but I couldn’t stop reading. We were just over half way when they closed the museum.
Our last day in Berlin started well…I got new Birkenstocks!!
We then made our way to the Pergamon Musseum. (sounds like pokemon!) It was amazing and the heaters were on full blast…so very hot.
This whole temple was take from Pergamon, Turkey (I think) and rebuilt here in the museum. It was amazing.
This gate was the entrance to a market place in Greece
Lindsay made a new friend
and then was mauled by a tile goat.
My favourite section was the royal entranceway from an Byzantine Palace.
The lions
and the Daisies
were still in brilliant colour. It was huge and amazing.
The artifacts in the Pergamon would make the British Museum green with envy, and Cassie red with fury!
After the Pergamon (pokemon) museum it was time for a pretzel, because you are not allowed to leave Berlin until you have tried one
it didn’t actually taste very nice
We then went back to the Brandenburg gate
and the Reichstag
to take some better photos.
The next morning we got up early-ish and made our way to the train station, where we waited for our train to Prague
the train arrived, we hopped on. Lindsay went straight to laptoping
and I took photos of weird stuff like
my new birkenstocks
and bright yellow buildings
Up next Prague!