Here's to that time my friends and I went to Berlin with the Erasmus Student Network. Do you know that feeling when you find yourself in one of those historical cities and you feel the urge to visit all the most meaningful places? That's what happened to me while I was in Berlin and of course I could not resist visiting the German Parliament.
First of all, you need to keep in mind that Berlin is not exactly a colourful city. Buildings, squares, streets, skyscrapers, everything's monochromatic, grey. Even the sky on an average day looks grey. The only exception that can be made is for the green areas - which, on a rainy day, look just as grey as the rest of the city.
Back to that day, we were all staying at the A&O Berlin Mitte hotel, which is just a few underground stops away from the Bundestag. We got up early even though the night before we had been awake until 4 a. m. partying, but with the right amount of coffee we were good to go. We took the metro until the Deutscher Bundestag stop. When we got off of the metro I immediately noticed that the preeminent colour was not grey anymore. There were a lot of differently coloured flowers, a lot of green, but most importantly, there were a lot of people!
We had to cross a vast lawn in order to get to the Parliament. Here's what it looks like as soon as we realised what we were looking at.
As you can see, there are a lot of German flags and even one European Union flag. The building itself still looked grey, but from my perspective it seemed as if everything was converging in its direction, and this made it look like it was the centre of some kind of non-static energy.
We had to queue for almost an hour before we were allowed to go inside. Of course we had to pass the security checks in order to go in. I remember it was incredibly cold. We had the chance to bring an audio guide with us alongside with a map of the building. We even had the chance to choose the language in which we wanted to listen to the audio guide! Since we were with the ESN guys, my friends and I thought it was better to take the audio guide and not the map. Once we were inside, a guy came to us saying that we could attend one of the Parliament's conferences - but it was, of course, in German. Since there was a limited number of available places, he suggested to only attend it if we were able to understand what the topic of the conference was. I have to admit, at the time my level of German listening was just above A2, according to the OLS system. The truth is, I wasn't able to fully understand a conversation between two German native speakers. Neither were my friends. So we decided to leave those spots to someone who could fully appreciate the experience.
Along with the others who decided not to attend the conference, we were lead to the room where the Parliament usually discuss the most important issues. Here's what it looks like:
I felt great respect and also a sort of power, standing there where great people work together everyday in order to make people's lives better. The room seemed way bigger standing inside of it than it does now looking at this picture. We stood there for almost half an hour, I think, while the audio guide told us all we needed to know about it. I was beyond fascinated, coming to know all its history. Then we went outside and there was a giant elevator - I think it was supposed to carry more than forty people. A guy told us to hop on so we could continue visiting the rest of the building, so we all did as he said.
The elevator stopped on the last floor and that's where we saw the dome that we had spotted when we were still outside. It was enormous and entirely made up of glass and steel. It had a spiral plain staircase all around it.
This picture is not very clear, but you can see people going up the staircase on the left. On the other side it was only made of glass, like a gigantic window.
We started going up as the audio guide explained every curiosity or interesting fact about it. The wonderful thing is, through that dome we could see the whole city below us. I really enjoyed that. The staircase ended on a pathway that lead us to a giant balcony. I recall it was really windy. The balcony was very high, so it offered the whole city of Berlin as a view. I took some pictures, here they are.
I actually took many more but I cannot post them all here.
In the end, I think the Deutscher Bundestag (in English, the German Parliament) is one of the things I've enjoyed the most visiting in Berlin. I'd go there a hundred times more - possibly knowing how to speak German!
