This was the second day of our tour of Berlin museums. According to Drew’s watch, we walked 16,500 steps and climbed 21 flights of stairs!

Museum Island has five museums and we picked three of them for today. The first was the Pergamonmuseum, The museum houses Roman & Greek art collections, plus Babylonian & Persian artifacts. The highlights include the Ishtar Gate and the bust of Nefertiti.

Pergamonmuseum – Roman & Greek art collections, plus Babylonian & Persian antiquities.

The construction in the background is a new section of the museum that will be ready in a few years.

Pergamonmuseum

Pergamonmuseum

Street market near the museums.

TV tower in the distance.

Ampelmann - The "walk now" character originally on East Berlin traffic signals. It has become very popular with all Berliners.

Berlin Cathedral behind the museum colonnade.

Bullet pock marks on a colonnade post.

After the Pergamonmuseum we went to the Bode Museum for more Byzantine art.

Bode Museum

After finishing that, we walked to Hackescher Markt for lunch.

Lunch at Hackescher Markt

After lunch we went to the Neues Museum. It’s a 19^th Century museum featuring Egyptian artifacts and prehistoric archaeology. The building was heavily damaged in WWII and has been reconstructed to nearly the way it was before the war.

Neues Museum – 19th-century museum with collections of Egyptian artwork & prehistoric archaeology.

From Museum Island we took a bus to the Bundestag area to wait for our 5:30 pm appointment to visit the dome of the Reichstag. We walked through Tiergarten Park and discovered the Soviet Memorial. 20,000 Soviet soldiers died in the Battle of Berlin in the Spring of 1945. 2500 of those troops have been interred there.

Soviet Memorial

Our final event of the day was a tour of the Reichstag Dome. Visitors walk up a ramp to the top for a view of the city. We used the audio guide that pointed out various points around the city.

Reichstag Dome