Berlin Day 2

Argh, how terrible. At 3am the snoring started right beside me and I slept only 20 minutes here and there till 9am. And that was with earplugs. At 4am as I wandered around the hostel I decided I had had enough (well, one more night. Hmmm, and then Paris...)

Anyway, I started the next day rather exhausted and took the train to the intercity bus station. I've learned that in general, Germans really hate the train, it is too expensive so they take the bus, or hitchhike, or use a car pooling service. The car pooling webpage is pretty neat. If you are driving a distance, you enter that into the webpage and can pick up passengers to help split the cost of gas. You just work out pickup and dropoff points and a lot of people use it instead of public transportation.

After arranging my bus ticket for tomorrow's ride to Hamurg I went to the Zoo. Yes, I am probably zoo'd out, but I'd heard that the Berlin zoo was very famous. It also holds a large number of species. So they had both the normal and narrow stripped zerbra's, the common chimp and the Bonobo, a bazillion large cats, tons of birds but still no echidna. They also had Knut (kuh-newt), the not so cute polar bear (he was cuter three years ago as a cub and according to the couple I am staying with here, is famous for being famous).

Anyway, zoo fatigue aside, I spent another long day walking around. They had many different species of bear, the sun bear would go to the water surrounding his enclosure and would fish out the algae and eat it.


They were just cute.

The chimp also wanted a towel to sleep on when he was sunbathing in the grass.


To compare the Munich and Berlin zoo's, I liked the Munich zoo better. It was nicer to walk around, the cages were bigger (because it was a newer zoo) and they actually gave you a piece of paper that had the map and feeding times. At the Berlin zoo you got nothing and maps were hard to find. By luck I ended up at the big cats during the feeding times. The Berlin zoo had a male lion and he was roaring because he wanted his dinner. I guess if you were interested in seeing large numbers of species the Berlin zoo was worth it, but if not, I liked the Munich zoo better. Of course, that could also be a bit of zoo fatigue and the fact that I was at the Berlin zoo on the weekend.

Baby Ostrich - I don't think I've seen one of those before. There were actually a lot of baby animals at the Berlin zoo.


I didn't get this, the bison with the west coast native American house and totem poles?

Here I am, like Leonardo DiCaprio, posing with Knut (that would be the polar bear in the background). Granted, he's not as cute now, but the biggest celebrity I've met so far.

After the zoo I went downtown to the parliment building (Reichstag building). From the front I had a view of the Swiss embassy (for the Swiss in the audience).

At the top of the building was a large dome you could climb (after passing through security). They also had one of the best audio tours, the machine started automatically as you started up the ramp and would automatically detect where you were and would play the appropriate track.

The dome had mirrors to direct the sunlight into the chambers below.

Here's a photo of me on the ramp taken looking at the mirrors.

So after my long day walking around I had my last night in the hostel. It was amazing, 16 people and only one quiet snorer which the mp3 player covered quite nicely. I slept through the night!