The next day in Berlin, we went to the Jewish museum, and the design of the building is worth the hype. Some areas can be quite disorientating, and the garden of exile with it’s high columns and uneven paving really makes you feel a bit queasy and anxious. There was an exhibition in an area called the Memory Void (an open area that went up about 4 floors) where there were all these steal faces covering the floor. It was called the Fallen Leaves and you could walk across them, it made this clanging noise which sounded like being near a construction site, but I couldn’t bring myself to join in. All those faces!
Because the rest of the museum had such a large display and there were other things I wanted to see that day (plus hungry and sore feet) so we decided at the next museum I would separate from Svendlemouse and Star and they could also have time some just couple time.
The next museum was the Checkpoint Charlie museum. It was very cool, but I did rush a it through it, you could definitely have spent longer there. It was fascinating and sobering reading all the different accounts of escape, and there was also a section about different religions and another about different political uprisings (including the one in Egypt recently). They even had the different vehicles that were used in escapes and a lot of other memorabilia.
After that I headed back to the hotel to write some letters and to grab my iPad and found an Internet cafe to update my posts and read emails. Then wandered around looking at shops and posted my letters and headed back home. On the walk back I went along Unter den Linden and saw the book burning memorial which is a glass panel in the paving stones at Bebel Platz where you can see a white room of empty book cases below.