Thursday, January 1st we stayed in the same Potsdam hotel a second night. We anticipated that we may need to sleep in after New Years eve, and in fact didn’t get moving until around noon. We had lunch in Potsdam, then set off by train to explore Berlin.
When we roughly planned out our trip we thought about seeing some of the world renowned museums on Berlin’s Museum island, but unfortunately when we looked up hours most of them were closed on New Years day. Instead of the museums when we got to Berlin we stopped at two places to see the Berlin wall. The first stop was the east side gallery, a place where they had a long section of the wall still up and let graffiti artists paint it. The other stop was the Berlin wall memorial; its more like an outdoor museum with display boards, with the section of the wall there looking like it did in 1989.
As the sun was setting we made one last stop in Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag building. It was very touristy around the gate, but we were able to get up close, and actually see it, unlike the previous night. The Reichstag building is where the German government meets. It seemed like the day flew by without us seeing very much, but I guess that just means we’ll have to make another trip to Berlin someday.
