Breakfast, Gods, and Kings

*I already spent a loooong time on the train writing this post and selecting pictures for it, and somehow didn't save a draft--grrrrr!

Our rooms at the WA include a breakfast that is normally 30€. Here is the breakfast room.

The buffet includes a juice bar with about eight different kinds of freshly squeezed juices; a cereal bar with a variety of flakes, grains, nuts, and fruits so you can make your own mix (heaven for Mike, Mason, and Kenzie); about 10 different kinds of cold meats and accompanying sauces and condiments (we all agree the smoked trout and paper-thin beef were the best, and with the roumalade sauce they were amazing!); at least 30 different kinds of cheeses, butter, and yogurts with various fruit purées; many kinds of fruit; scrambled and 8-minute eggs; sausages and bacon; and many different breads, pastries, and rolls.  And it was all presented like a still life in one of the many museums we have been to. Here's a few pics to wet your appetite:

If you can't find something to eat on the buffet, the chefs will make you anything you want from waffles, to toast, to omelettes, to the poached eggs on a bed of greens that Bart orders every morning.  

And so we face each new day fortified and prepared to meet the challenges before us.

After breakfast we headed off to Museum Island to see rare and amazing things.  The island is home to some of the world's great museums and is flanked on the river side by the Berlin Dome, a huge and beautiful Protestant church.

A closer view of the front door and Lori chatting to Bart's driver, Ben, at the van we rode around in when we were not taking the train.  Ben is a native Berliner, super nice, and a treasure trove of knowledge about Berlin and Germany. I need a Ben.

Later in the day we were able to attend a short 20 min. service in the church and listen to some amazing organ pieces.  Here's what it looks like on the inside.

When visiting Museum Island, there is no way to see everything, so each of us picked our #1 thing to see and we filled in from there.  Lori's first pick was Queen Neferterri. So we headed to the Neues (New) Museum which is full of really old stuff.  They have a pretty great Egytian collection including the famous bust of the fabled beautiful Egytian queen.  We weren't allowed to tKe pictures, but you can google her.  She was even more beautiful in real life than I imagined she would be.  

John landed in Berlin around 11:30 and was exhausted and starving.  So after Ben got him from the airport, they all picked us up and we went to lunch at this funky little Vietnamese place.

The food was fantastic.

I did pretty good here, but so much of the trip has pictures of food that is half eaten or no pictures at all.  We are always so starving by the time we eat, we forget to take pictures until the first ravenous frenzy is almost over, and we look around and lament that we, yet again, forgot to take pictures! So, I'm sorry if you foodies out there are getting shafted in the food porn department.

Ben dropped us off before taking John home to the WA for a much needed nap. 

Back to the isle of museums, my #1 was the Gates of Ishtar at the Pergamon.  They were built around 600 BC by King Nebuchadnezzar. It's hard for the pictures to do them justice or to convey the scale.  Only the smaller outer gates were reconstructed in the museum, the inner gate being almost twice as tall and too large to fit into the museum, as can be seen in the picture of the scaled model below.  The rest of them are in storage. The avenue leading to the walled fortress was lined with a tall wall that is also reconstructed in the Pergamon.

There was tons of other cool stuff there.  An ancient Roman gate to the city of Miletus:

And the incredible Pergamon Alter built in 200 BC that is partially reconstructed and has a frieze depicting the battle between the Gods and the Giants.

There was also beautiful Islamic and Persian artifacts, rugs, buildings and lots of Egytian artifacts and statues.

 

We navigated the subway back home to meet up with John and Bart for dinner.  It's been pretty fun because we were in Madrid when Spain played in the World Cup, and Germany was playing this night. The game had just ended when were headed out to find something to eat, and there was a crazy party going on in the streets everywhere.  Horns honking, people singing and yelling, cheering, fans dressed up in wild outfits with the German flag festooning everything and everybody; painted faces and wild hats, and lots of drinking! We walked to a beer garden and had sandwiches and watched the celebration go on around us.  It was pretty fun and exciting. Unfortunately, none of my pictures really turned out well.

And thus ends our first full day in Berlin.  See why I'm so tired and behind on blogging?