All Alone in Big, Bad Berlin

As JFK once famously said "Ich bein ein Berliner" (which actually means I am a jelly donut, known as a Berliner... what he should have said was Ich bein Berliner... but hey, its the sentiment that counts...)

I managed to score a lift to Berlin (thank you Mark, the best tour leader EVER) and am joining the Topdeck mob for a pub crawl later tonight. Until then, I have been entertaining myself on Museum island, which is an island in East Berlin full of elephants (I wish... Well, that would be pretty damn cool).
I saw the Pergamon which, for those history buffs out there, is home to the Pergamon altar and the Ishtar gate, two pretty huge finds in archeology. They have both been reconstructed in the museum to give some idea of how imposing they must have been originally and they are pretty damn impressive. Especially the Ishtar gate, which was built by King Nebachanezza in Babylon.
I wandered around the Ancient History museum and the Egyptian museum as well, which is home to THE statue of Neferiti that pretty much everyone would have seen on a poster/book/postcard/hairy mans arm... and for something thats had no restoration work, it looks amazingly new.

This afternoon is reserved for the task of tackling the bits of Berlin that caused so much pain and anguish around the world. I visited the Eastside Gallery yesterday, which is a section of the Berlin Wall that was painted just before it was torn down in 1988 (i think it was 88, feel free to correct me) and we drove past Checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the more notorious checkpoints between East and West Berlin - Im heading back for a closer inspection today. There is also a brand new memorial to the holocoust victims in Berlin. Its a whole garden of gray, tomb-like slabs in varying heights and sizes, designed to confuse and overwhelm people and perhaps gain a perspective of something that seems so impossible. I cant write too much because I havent been there quite yet but it will be different after visiting Austwizch on Sunday.