Berlin has two zoos: the oldest one is located in the west (just a couple of train stops from our hotel—merely a coincidence, I protest) and the newer, bigger Tierpark was created after the wall went up in the east. As a result, Berlin has the most zoo animals of any city.
We went to see the original one and were lucky to catch a lot of active animals, in particular the primates, a pacing panda waiting to be fed, and swimming, playing penguins. Photo of the day is some baboons. The little one scrambled down the rocks then turned around, only to lose its footing; luckily there were some helping hands close by.
We found it hard to leave, mostly because we couldn't find the exit but also because we kept seeing animal displays we hadn't seen before.
Headed to Potsdamer Platz and the Dali Museum. I'm still not entirely sure why it's in Berlin as opposed to his native Spain but I'm not complaining. It was the third Dali exhibition I've seen, the others being in Melbourne and Singapore, and different to both of those. The Melbourne exhibition focused a lot on his paintings and some sculpture and objects, while the Singapore exhibition had a lot of sculpture and illustrations. This one consisted of commissioned illustrations in the main, as well as sketches, commercial commissions (medals from the LA Olympic Games, travel ads etc) and a couple of sculpted works. Every time I see his work I'm reminded how much of a genius he is. Have you noticed the way he draws hair?
Boff wanted to see a bombed out church in the Tiergarten but we got to where the map said it was and there was a perfectly intact church in its place. We later found out that they decided to build a church next to the ruins so we "missed it by that much".
Also went up the Victory Monument, which cemented the fact that Berlin just isn't a very interesting city from above, and then went to Checkpoint Charlie where there is a vast museum that the owner started after World War II, even before the wall went up.
We arrived a touch under 80 minutes before closing and had to convince the cashier to sell us tickets because she was adamant it would take 90 minutes to do the whole thing. Well, after doing what ended up being a cursory tour of the place, you could spend three days there and still not see everything. My favourite part was all the escape stories (I don't care much for the politics) and even they were hard to single out among the collage of stuff in the place unless they had an artefact attached (e.g. cars in which people smuggled other people).
After the museum closed (the cash register closed, giving us no warning while we were browsing the souvenir shop) we went out to take photos of Checkpoint Charlie then, in true Berlin style, had a kebab for dinner.
P.S: The title of this post is a reference to JFK's speech in which he utters the words "Ich bin ein Berliner"—I am a Berliner—whereas mine says I am not a Berliner.
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