Saturday: departure day, although not until the evening. But it did mean I had to pack everything properly and bear in mind what I might need easy access to on the night train. Paid the hotel bill – only the second time I'd seen my hosts as I'd been out very early on both of the previous mornings – and to the nearby stop for the 142 bus to the Hauptbahnhof to leave my suitcase; the bus a new discovery for me, saving the 1.5km slog along Inviladenstraße which is currently in the middle of road works. The luggage lockers at the station are open again now – last time I was here everyone had to use the manual check-in system.
Then S-bahn to Friedrichstraße Bahnhof, U6 to Stadt Mitte with its confusing multiple exits, and eventually to Gendarmenmarkt. The sun is shining, for the first time since Leipzig! Which is just as well as I have no inside visits planned for my final day. I hung around Gendarmenmarkt for quite a while, enjoying the sun and taking a few pix of the Konzerthaus and the tall, narrow, matching Deutscher Dom and Französischer Dom:
The tower of the Französischer Dom had been closed as there was a wedding taking place in the church, but it reopened around 13:30 and inevitably I climbed to the top for views over the city. Then to Bebelplatz, where the outside of the opera house, the Deutscher Staatoper, is undergoing building work. But the point of interest for me was the glass panel, perhaps 4-feet or so square, let into the cobbles and providing a view into the Empty Library, whose blank shelves commemorate the book burning by the Nazis in 1933.
Across Unter den Linden to Neue Wache, designed as a guard house by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1818 and used as such for a hundred years. It is now the National Memorial to Victims of War and Tyranny. At its centre an enlarged replica – by Harald Haacke – of the sculpture "Mother with her dead son" by Käthe Kollwitz:
Farther east along Unter den Linden to the river the crowds were heavier and the music louder, so I did the tourist thing as far as Alexanderplatz and the base of the Fernsehturm, before admitting defeat and heading west by S-bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof. At which point I dropped my sunglasses and someone must have seen them fall and made off with them. Basta!
Before grabbing some junk food in the station and making for my 19:08 night train to Paris, I called in to the nearby Hamburger Bahnhof, an old station that is now the Museum für Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art). But the only ticket they could offer was a €12.00 combi-ticket to the entire museum, which certainly wasn't worth it for the less than an hour I had available.
So that's it. Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin.
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