The first thing I did was go to the Berliner Dom, on Museum Island. I had it in my head that I was going to walk up to the cupola and look at the view of Berlin, because it was sunny this morning, but due to "technical problems" the cupola walkway is closed. There was a service going on when I went in, so I couldn't enter the main floor, but I sat for awhile in a room overlooking the service and watched.
After going to the Dom and watching part of the service, I went to the zoo! The Berlin zoo is much much prettier than the zoo at home. It looks like a park. My immediate impression was that it seems like the people are much closer to the animals than in any other zoo, and it was really cool. Pretty much all of the animals had both an outside area and an inside area, which is unlike the zoo at home (Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle). Once I got over how cool it was to be so close to the animals, and how small the zoo seemed, I realized it was this way because the spaces for the animals were just smaller than I was used to, which meant that the animals were just necessarily closer to the people. Also, the animals largely didn't seem to have a choice whether they were inside or outside, because there were doors separating the two parts, which I always saw closed. And for the whole time I was there, most of them seemed to be closed inside. Which made the close proximity not so cool anymore, and much more sad. Especially most of the big cats, who seemed to spend most of their time pacing their cages and roaring. I don't feel like I can make any generalizations about the quality of the zoo though, since I've only been to about three zoos in my whole life, including this one. I'm just wondering now what the standards are for zoos, regarding humane treatment of animals, and how other zoos compare in this regard to the ones I've been to.
Despite my complaints though, it was pretty cool to have a lion 3 feet away from me, looking at me and roaring. And I got to watch them feed the tigers! Looking at the animal names in German was weird and silly sometimes, because I would be looking at the animal, and looking at a picture of the animal, and I wouldn't really know what it was called, because not all of them had the English name on the sign. Also, the monkeys are always fun to watch, but it's always a little weird to watch the gorilla and orangutans, because you can't help but notice how much we have in common with them when you look at their facial expressions and gestures and movements.
After I went to the zoo I headed over to Museum Island to see the Neues Museum. The Neues museum is a museum of Egyptian history, prehistory, and early history. So needless to say, it is big. I basically went because it was highly recommended by Kirsten, and because it has Egyptian stuff, which is also cool. But what ended up being the best part of my visit was the building itself. The museum originally designed by Friedrich August Stüler, and then was mostly destroyed in WWII. It was closed for 70 years, and work to salvage it and renovate it only started to happen in the 1980s. There was a competition to see who would design the new museum, and David Chipperfield won. The new building is incredible. There are parts of the old building left in the design, and the whole things is this beautiful blend of classic architecture and really modern looking design. I don't know enough really to be able to describe architecture, but here are some pictures. (I ended up taking way more pictures of the architecture than the actual exhibits.)
comments:
There are currently no comments.
Post a Comment