We headed to the Pergamonmuseum early in the morning. The line to enter wasn’t too long and since it was so early there weren’t too many people in the museum yet.

I was most excited about this museum. The Pergamon Altar is reconstructed inside the museum, although not exactly the way it was in the original city of Pergamon.

Around the bottom of the altar runs a frieze of an epic battle between the Olympian gods and the Titans. Much of the frieze was destroyed, but a good portion of it was saved so that some of the gods could be identified. When the altar was in its original form the frieze ran along the entire outside of the altar. The most important parts of the battle were depicted on the back of the altar, because people were forced to walk the entire altar before reaching the front. In the museum the back portion of the frieze has been moved in front of the altar instead.

The steps up to the altar.

Athena battling the Titans.

The next room opened into a reconstruction of a gate that lead to a Roman marketplace.

Market Gate of Miletus

And the last reconstruction was of the Ishtar Gate, one of the gates leading into the city of Babylon.

Entrance to Babylon

The Processional Way, partly a reconstruction of the pathway people would have walked down to reach the gate.

The special exhibit in the museum was Islamic art.

Wood paneled ceiling. The attention to detail was amazing.

We decided that we were done with museums after we finished with the Pergamon. Our roommate at the hostel told us about another part of the wall that we could visit with paintings and murals, so we decided to visit that and get some fresh air.

This section of the wall was much bigger than the last one we visited and the entire east side was painted by different artists.

Once the east side came to an end we looped around to the west side, which mostly follows along the river, but there is also a park.

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The next day was a Sunday and a day full of traveling disasters!

Halfway through our first train ride, the conductor announced that there was something wrong with the train and that we would be about an hour and a half late. This completely messed up the rest of our day and made it so that we missed both of our connections to Vienna.

However, it was not only one train that had problems, every train we rode was in some way late. On one of them we even had to take the “old track” as the conductor said.

It was a stressful day, considering that even though we all speak German, we still couldn’t understand what the conductor said half the time.

What should have been an easy and pleasant ride back to Vienna turned into a 15 hour day, but we all arrived home safe and sound, just in time to sleep before class the next morning.