Get prepared to get serious and political today. All I can say is that I hope you like "history" because this is pretty much just me quoting Wikipedia and pretending that I still know all of this from school. The things I do for this blog...
The German Reichstag has been such an important landmark in Berlin since the first time I visited that I somehow instinctively felt it has always been the meeting house of the parliament.
Turns out, however, it has only been re-used as such since 1999(!). I guess it makes sense, if you think about it (and leaned it in school in German history class but somehow never realised this is all recent and actually happening).
When Germany was divided the German Democratic Republic started meeting in the Palast der Republik (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R0821-400%2C_Berlin%2C_Palast_der_Republik.jpg (in this picture you can actually recognise the Reichstag in the background (it is in the upper left side))) and the Federal Republic of Germany would just ignore Berlin altogether and meet 600 km away in Bonn (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F010479-0006%2C_Bonn%2C_Bundeshaus_mit_Fahnen.jpg).
After the reunification in 1990 they decided to return to this building which had not only been abandoned for 45 years but also severely damaged in a fire in 1933. So clearly they needed to clean up a couple of things here and there which apparently took them 9 years. The result is really cool, though:
The Reichstag has now a glass cupola on top instead of the old roof one and the idea behind this is that people can walk all the way up and look down on the politicians meeting up (look down in the best and most symbolic sense of the word, not in a "spit on them from above"-sense). You can see the blue seats from the parliament in the picture above.
You can climb all the way up to the top of the cupola along the white path in the picture above. I also really like the mirrors in the middle. I mean, this is Germany, not Morocco, they are going to need every photon that makes it through the clouds.
was sind wir nur für spanische Deutschlandpatriotas! ich war jetzt auch schon 2mal im Reichstag :P und natürlich wurde es im Jahr neunundetwas wiedereröffnet, weil ALLES irgendeine decada feiern musste als wir 2009 in dem superspannenden Vortrag waren :P (never forgetting that one)
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