Day 3: Brunch and the sights

Well the day started out tough enough for me. As we all know now, Alabama played a tough game but made too many mistakes and ultimately lost to Ohio State. Very sad, but I'll still be traveling to Dallas anyway to see Mari! And maybe we'll still see if we can get tickets to the game. 

But anyways, since I was the only one who watched the game until the end, I was up until after 7am (!!!) and then had to wake up just after 10am. So exhausted but hopefully not so exhausted that grumpy Cheryl came out haha. 

We got up and headed to this place California Breakfast Slam to have brunch. Because of my late bedtime I was especially starving so Carissa and I shared blueberry pancakes, banana walnut pancakes, and biscuits and gravy. The pancakes were delicious! And had this wonderful sauce on them but the sausage gravy left a little to be desired. I think maybe biscuits and gravy should only be done in the US...

But after that, it was about 2pm so we hopped back on the metro to go see the Charlottenberg Palace, which was one of the royal residences of Friedrich the Great (yay, Prussians!). We saw the New Wing since we were short on time before closing. It was nice, lots of old paintings and old chairs and old things. But also lots of gold detail and an old library which I thought was cool because it had original versions of the works of the great thinkers from the Enlightenment like Voltaire. 

After the palace we headed back to the Brandenberg Gate to get pictures of it without the other 1.5 million people who were there on New Years Eve. It was all lovely and lit up and we got some great photos of it and the American embassy that is right next to it (we got some prime real estate, yall). 

Next was the Holocaust Memorial which is less than a block away. We walked among the blocks and then headed to Checkpoint Charlie, the gate between East and West Berlin where at least 150 people perished trying to make it from the East to the West. 

I also learned a neat fact about how to tell whether you're in East or West Berlin: the walking signals at intersections. If you're in West Berlin, the walking signals look similar to what we have here, a stick figure with a round head. In East Berlin however, the walking signals is a stick figure who wears a hat! And apparently some people are up in arms that the signal is a man and think there should be women on the signals as well. My response to that? I'm sure there are bigger fish to fry. 

But anyway, after that we headed to dinner! We went to a German restaurant that serves typical German fare and it was Delicious! I had pork, Zurich style, with spatzlä (sp?). I tried to order some goulash as well but our waiter said it was too much haha. Whig turns out he was right because these portions were HUGE. But that didn't stop us from getting this huge dessert to share amongst everyone all in all, a very delicious end to the day. 

And end of the day it was for me. After 7 miles of walking (which is actually our daily average so far), and my lack of sleep, I was done with the day. So into bed I went and now we're on the train to Dresden!

Pictures in the next post, I promise! I haven't yet had time to upload them but will do that now that we made it to Prague :)