friends. Because we are both museum visiting, book loving, introverted smarty pantses. (I’m declaring that the plural of smarty pants is smarty pantses.)
So on Sunday morning, we trammed back to the city center and bought a pass for Museum Island, a magical place in Berlin built just for people like us. First on the itinerary was the Pergamon Museum. I had wanted to go there for a long time because it houses the Ishtar Gate from ancient Mesopotamia. We got there before the crowds so our photographs of the first few things we saw are uncluttered by tourists.
After the Bode, we ate our packed lunch of cheese sandwiches and carrots by the river, then continued on to the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Altes Museum. The former is rather small though it does have works by Caspar David Friedrich (whose works I’m most familiar with from my high school English textbooks) and Rodin’s Thinker (one of many copies/versions). The latter has many artifacts from antiquity, particularly Greek and Roman.
In fact, we ended our sightseeing not with that final museum, but with another church, Marienkirche. It is famous for its mural depicting the Dance of Death. But the mural is badly faded and in need of restoration so they are doing a fund-raiser. For €2.50 you can buy a tile to place on their fund-raiser plexiglass version and the money goes toward the restoration project.
We were a little tired from all the walking (and stair climbing in the museums) and spent our final evening enjoying the English language movie channel, which was showing X-Men: First Class. We had both seen it before but were more than happy to take in the eye candy that is Michael Fassbender.