Day 22

Today, Monday, proved to be a very long and tiring day for me.  The song Manic Monday comes to my mind when thinking of the past day.  Waking up for me this morning was not fun, seeing that we returned back our apartment very, very late last night from Amsterdam.  Despite starting off the day tired, it proved to be a very nice day (all of which except this awful weather that followed me from Amsterdam).  We first started by going out to the Olympic Park area of West Berlin.  While there we had a tour of the Unite de Habitation Building. 

The famous architect Corbusier did this uniformed designed apartment building in 1958 after he won a competition to design this standardized apartment building.  Included in his design was a roof top garden and a balcony for every unit within.  Also, our tour guide let us all visit is 3-room apartment, which was beautifully done and provided great views of the city.  

After leaving the Unite de Habitation Building we proceeded to view several other socialist apartment complexes and St. Laurentius Church in the area. 

After lunch we viewed the Q Hotel, the Kant Triangle.  The triangle was a very interesting design in my opinion.

After seeing some other buildings we made our way to the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, which was very ugly from the outside but so beautiful from the inside.  I only have a picture of the insides of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Church and of the old one; none of the exterior. 

After seeing the pretty church we made our way over to KaDeWe.  This giant department store is like the Harrods’s of Germany.  Aaliyah and I only stayed for a short amount of time because we decided we definitely needed to come back when we had more time. 

Afterwards, we were given a short break before our tour of the interior of the Reichstag.  In the beginning of the month we were able to go up to the Reichstag; however, this time we were able to tour the interior of the building.  The Reichstag is where the Parliament meets for all of Germany.  The tour was very well done and the interior was beautiful.  I loved how the architect, Norman Foster, renovated the building in 1999 with keeping so many of the original styles from when it was built in the early 1930s. 

After our tour was completely I proceeded to call it an early night in anticipation of catching up on some much needed sleep that I had not gotten from my long train ride yesterday.