Well, I finally left Berlin, though I only got to do most of the stuff I wanted, but I shall return again some day. I did get to pack in a few more things though before heading to my new town for the next couple days.

It started off bright and earlier (at 9:30) with a trip to that Naturkunden Museum, or Natural History museum. It’s huge! It has over 30 million specimens! Of course most are locked away, as the museum is still a prominent research facility with its own scientists. It’s got tons of dinosaur fossils, including the biggest fossil of a brachiosaurus known! It’s gone a huge room full of hundreds and hundreds of rock and crystal samples from all around the world. There’s a section on space with a jar off spacedust along with several meteorites. There’s a huge section with stuffed (taxidermied) animals and birds. Then there was also one of the eeriest things I’ve ever seen – a HUGE storehouse with thousands, and thousands of jars with preserved fish and sea creatures. There were shelves of jars that go 20 feet or more into the air, big and small forming a wall around a lab with yet thousands more jars of fish inside the lab. There were stairs within it and a second floor to allow access to more of the jars. It was weird. Next was a room on how they do taxidermy, so there’s all kinds of samples in various stages of production in the taxidermy process. Then came another room, with a famous icon. Knut, Berlin’s beloved Eisbär (ice-bear, or polar bear) now stands stuffed behind a glass wall. Knut was born and then raised by humans in the Berlin Zoo, as his mother rejected him. There was also another huge room of hundreds and hundreds of birds, but that gallery was closed. After that I went to the gift shop and noticed something I’ve never seen for sale before. An actual t-rex tooth fossil for sale! Picture below! They had several other high profile fossils available for sale… and well… they weren’t cheap.

After that I headed back to the colossal stone monument, the Schwerbelastungskörper. The giant stone block, the only remaning “tangible” testament to the Nazi’s grand, and delusional city planning efforts. Hitler wanted Berlin to be the capital of a new Germania, and the capitol of the world. At one end of a massive street would be an absolutely monumentally massive “Volkshalle” (People’s Hall) which would have been so massive it could easily house St. Peter’s Basilica with in. It wasn’t even a realistic idea given the construction technology and resources available at the time. This time it was open and I could get some decent pictures of it. At the south end of the street, would have been an archway, as previously mentioned, several times the size of the Arc du Triomphe, and this stone was to test the sinking speed, and determine how much structural foundation work would need to be done.

After that, I gathered all my stuff and left Berlin! I am now far, far away in the distant city of Potsdam… which actually just borders right on Berlin. Haven’t done anything yet here, but there is loads of stuff! It did rain on my walk from the train station to my hotel, so it was the first time I had to use my umbrella, although it was multiple light and soft rains. But the bathroom in my hotel has a speaker which plays sound from the tv, so there’s that which is nice.

Well it seems many of the pictures have uploaded to the site, but are going very, very slowly so I will post the ones I have now, and finish it up tomorrow. (I’ll put a reminder to come back and visit here!)