July 24

This morning we took a free walking tour with the same company that we used in Munich.  The guides are paid by tips only so they have good incentive to make the tours interesting and colorful with some good stories.  We saw the typical sights of the Brandenburg Tor, Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Checkpoint Charlie, and some of the city squares, like where the book burning took place.  We ended up on Museum Island in front of the German Cathedral there.  From there we visited the Pergamum Museum which might have been the most incredible museum I have ever been in.  They had the Ishtar gate, essentially in its entirety there, and the Pergamum Altar in massive halls as well as extremely extensive collections of Greek and Roman statues with carpets and calligraphy and pretty much any artifact from antiquity that you could imagine.  There were rooms filled with massive Roman columns and it was really incredible.  I still cannot believe that they had what amounted to the entirety of the Pergamum Altar.  It is kind of unbelievable until you see it in person.  We probably walked around in there for 4 hours or so, just taking in all of the sights.  After visiting the Pergamum, we headed back to the hostel and then to meet Professor DeRooy for some supper.  We went to an authentic Bavarian restaurant for a great meal, which Calvin paid for very wonderfully.  After dinner our plan was to visit the Reichstag, but it was quite busy, so we put it off until tomorrow and instead took a walk around the area, looking at a cool bell tower and a theater type place given as a gift from the United States, which was now dedicated to world culture.  It should also be noted that I did a couple of cartwheels just to make sure that I still could.  After a long day of walking we just decided to head back to the hostel, and ended up talking with our roommate Alex for a while as well as attempting to plan what to do on Sunday.  This is the summer of walking, that is for sure.  The nice thing about Berlin was that it was not uphill walking, which had dominated most of our previous exploits.  It was another night where I had no trouble falling asleep.