Monday, August 5 was our first official day finally meeting up as a group. Many of us met in the lobby for an afternoon boat tour at 11:30. We did an ice breaker and everyone went around and said something that helps us remember our names.
Our one hour boat tour around Berlin was fun. Our tour guide pointed out Angela Merkel’s residence.
After the tour, we went to the Neues Museum. We learned it was pretty much destroyed during WWII. The museum staff redesigned the museum and brought back the Egyptian artifacts before it reopened in 2009. There were Egyptian sarcophagi displayed in the museum that were thousands of years old. At the end, we saw the famous bust of Nefertiti.
Afterwards we had free time to go back to the hotel and walk around the city. The weather has been beautiful and we saw many people sitting on the grass by many of the museums and galleries with their families and friends.
As a group, we went to dinner at Hakescher Hof. The two entree options were chicken and gnocchi. Desert was strawberries with vanilla bourbon ice cream and chocolate splinter. After dinner, some of us went to see live jazz, go to a salsa dancing class, or get a drink at a Biergarten.
Ben Wacks lives in Washington, DC.