There's a moment, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate at night, when the traffic clears and the lights settle, and you remember why you travel at all.
I'd been in Berlin a couple of days before I finally made it here, and I'm almost glad I waited. Some landmarks you should earn, not rush.
The gate was built from 1788 to 1791 — an 18th-century neoclassical monument, and one of the best-known landmarks in Germany. It went up on the site of an older city gate, the one that marked where the road left Berlin and ran toward Brandenburg an der Havel, once the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. King Frederick William II of Prussia ordered the current structure, and a royal architect named Carl Gotthard Langhans designed it. It's been standing through a lot since, and it still holds up to the hype.
What got me wasn't the history, exactly. It was the Quadriga on top — Victoria's chariot, four horses, the eagle standard — sitting there quietly above all the noise. I looked up at it longer than I meant to.
That's the thing about Berlin. It doesn't perform for you. It just is, and you either slow down enough to notice or you don't.
This was the beginning, not the end. The gate was the obvious first stop. The rest of the city, I want to wander into without a plan — and that's the whole point of exploring, isn't it?
Until the next run out — work hard, play hard.