Pics of Ben's trip to Berlin, week 2

My class is going better this week. I continue to understand more each day--remember all teaching is in German. The class is mostly grammar (vs. speaking), unlike many of the others, but this works very well for my goal of learning to read rather than speak.

Wednesday I went to the Jüdisches Museum. We had a bad tour guide, but it was a good museum. As a memorial of the Holocaust, they have room filled with these faces over which you must walk. It makes an eerie clinking sound as the metal moves under your feet. Very sobering as you think that this only represents a portion of the people killed.

The next day I went to the Pergamon Museum. It's very impressive. It has reconstructions from a large portion of an ancient Greek temple from Pergamon and most of the ancient Babylonian Gates from original materials from the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Both are about 2500 years old and show that ancient buildings could be both massive and ornate.

A portion of the Babylon Gates:

Part of the Pergamon Temple wall, which included scenes related to every god you could think of...
Here's another perspective...

In another Goethe tour today we were shown another way victims of the Holocaust are remembered--Stolpersteine, 'Stumbling Stones' are placed outside the houses of those who were deported and killed.