Der Fernsehturm

Woke up with my neck feeling mostly better, but still very achey and immobile in a few places, but hey, it was a lot better than yesterday (: We woke up around 9 and ate and headed to the Fernsehturm. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just look up a picture and I'm sure you'll recognize it. Its iconic across the world for Berlin and rightfully so. It is the tallest structure in Germany (4th tallest in Europe). The panoramic floor is around 666ft tall (scary number) and is around halfway up to the total 1,207ft top. I've never seen anything like it and today, I was going to go to the panoramic floor. Franzie and I waited in line and then headed up in the elevator which took "around 40 seconds" (the elevator man was proud, but this was ridiculously fast). The view from the top is astounding. In some spots it looked as if Berlin continued forever, but in others you could see more of suburbia and forested areas that surround the city/state of Berlin. We scouted out some of the buildings we had seen and took millions of pictures. In the picture above, you can see the big grey block, that is the Hauptbahnhof, and then off to the right is the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. Just to the bottom left of this picture is the Berlin cathedral. It was awesome! We headed back down, found Franzie's parents and then walked towards the river Spree. We saw Berlin's old city hall, which is a unique red/copper color and then Saint George Fighting the Dragon Statue (which I looked up information about, because I couldn't understand the way it was described: St. George slayed a dragon on horseback, saving a princess and a city. yep. I hoped it would've been a little more complex. Next we made it to the Müglendamm-Schleuse which is a flood gate that allows boats to pass, similar to the panama canal. Which was cool to see, but probably more familiar to me than they realized. We then came across a huge mall with tons of stores. We shopped for about two hours (me with no luck) and then went to the food court where I ate some asian noodles. yum (: After this we went to the Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Tor, but weren't able to go inside the actual museum part as it was closed because of it being monday and all. Hopefully, I'll be able to go back next week, though! We then went to KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) which was the most famous shopping area in the West. It has seven floors of anything you could imagine and it is all very expensive. Basically the German equivalent to Mall of America: Department store style. We ate a fancy snack on the seventh floor and then went down a floor and marveled at the amount of food and different types! I could've spent all day there looking at everything they had to offer, but we bought some perfect tasting bread for the morning and then headed out. We went to the Hauptbahnhof for dinner again, and because I wasn't very hungry, had french fries for dinner. We were all exhausted from the past few day's adventures and headed back to the apartment to sleep.