My last full day in Berlin has been a lot more relaxed than the past 2 days. I have seen most of the key landmarks and museums that I am interested nearby already, so I decided to venture a little further to the nearest palace to Berlin, Charlottenburg, I thought it would take me a hour or so to get to, but turned out, by subway it only took like 30 mins, it was surprisingly easy to get to. On a Sunday morning, the streets of Berlin and the train have been pretty quite. The weather here has been quite wet and cold, this morning was no exception, not as wet though, it was still cloudy. For a few moments, there were some suns as well, I just didn't manage to hold its hostage for the rest of the day. In fact, in the afternoon, it started to snow. Heavy, white out actually. I was at first very excited, I mean, this has been my first snow of the year and it has happened in Berlin. I even opened my mouth to taste the snow of Berlin, tasted a little salty, maybe I was just dehydrated. It started to come down really hard, so I had to look for shelter.


Back to the palace, it was a good 2 hours of walking from rooms to rooms, hallways to stairs, stairs to somewhere I was not supposed to and got escorted back to the beaten path. Lots of antique furniture, many porcelain, including a bunch of porcelain lady Buddha (Quan Yin), have you lost your way? Should I smuggle you back to China? Dead people paintings in every wall, just not as animated as the ones in Harry Potter. The interior was very nice, but I preferred the outdoor, the garden in the back was magnificent. If I knew you didn't need to pay to walk in the garden. I wouldn't have paid to see the inside, it wasn't bad, just not quite my taste. I did take a lot of reflection in mirror kind of pictures. I love taking reflection pictures.

It was 2pm already by the time I got back to town, first stopped by the apartment for a little bit of a "je ne sais quoi," and then I took the train to Warschauer Straße, looking for a record shop supposedly open on a Sunday per some online resources, but the store was apparently closed. I guess it's true, a lot of shops (all record shops at least) closed on Sunday, what does people do on Sunday, geez?! As I was wandering around the neighborhood, before I knew it, I stepped into the Simon-dach-straße, Ha.. you could smell the gayness in the air all in a sudden, how do I end up here? It was kind of an awkward time, 3-3:30pm on a Sunday afternoon, there were lines of cafes and restaurants, it seemed to be nice area to hang out with a group of friends. Maybe someday, meanwhile, I headed my way back to the S-bahn station.


Just across from the station, there was this dump-looking kind of place, like an emptied warehouse area. I have looked at that place from afar a couple of times, everywhere were covered with graffiti, very colorful, I was tempted to take a picture, but didn't want to look like a silly tourist, until I saw a few girls and some people with kids went down to that area, so I followed behind them. I started taking picture of every graffiti I saw, I thought it's now or never, there were kids around, no gangbangers would come bugging me. As I walked further into this property or whatever this was. I found that there was a designated warehouse for skateboarding, another for rock climbing. Ah, this was actually a designated area for teenagers or youths to hang out. I felt a little safer.


The snow started coming down as I took the train back. Excited at first. Then, we had the white out condition with wet heavy snow. As I started to feel the wet snow on my neck, I decided to go back to the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the beautiful structure I saw the first night. They have an exhibition on Homosexualität_en. Perhaps I spent an hour or so there. The exhibition was interesting, there were a lot of cultural stuff were in mainly German, like there was a record on display, presumably the women band name was Flying Lesbians! Two lesbians were listening to that record on a headphone, and mumbled along to the song. There was another display, a young boy in underwear looking into a mirror wearing a red lipstick, and here was a real man in his 30s, standing behind the boy taking a selfie into the mirror. I guess he shared the same experience as the displayed boy model. I found the other two exhibitions in this museum equally interesting, one is named 1945, it is about how Europe was coping in the post WWII era. It contained statistics about every countries that was impacted and there were various display of artifacts. Another exhibition is about unification of East and West Germany. I thought this made a good ending point for my sightseeing in Germany.


Dinner was at Boulevard Friedrichstrasse, a quick find on Google. Interestingly, the entire restaurant were packed with young Japanese cheer-leading girls. It was a birthday party or something, or I was in one of Groundhog Day movie scene that I cannot get rid of the Japanese cheer-leading girls! Another German dinner, started off with potato soup again, it just sounded good for cold weather. Main course was a Wild boar roast in dried fruit sauce with Brussel sprouts and bread dumplings. Ausgezeichnet! Israel tomorrow! I hope everything will go smoothly, in term of flight, passport control...etc etc.

See the other photos from Day 3 here.