Berlin | Visited the Neues Museum to see the ancient Egyptian queen 🏛

Every first Sunday of the month, museums in Berlin offer free admission. Some require a reservation made a week in advance, but not all. ANOHA, the German Museum of Technology, Haus am Waldsee, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art are exceptions. 🎫🆓 I didn't make such thorough preparations in advance, which is very human, and just walked in directly. 🚶‍♂️🚶‍♀️ This museum has been on my Google map for nearly 10 years, marked during my first visit to Berlin as a tourist, but I have no memory of ever being here. This time, I left with a little regret, which gives me something to look forward to next time. 🗺️💔 Compared to the Old Museum, the Neues Museum had significantly fewer people in line on the free admission Sunday. I arrived at 3:30 PM, and with about 10 people in front of me, it took less than 5 minutes to get in. ⏱️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️ The museum, called the Neues Museum, was originally the Berlin Egyptian Museum. It's quite interesting that in the capital of Germany, the museum's collection mostly comes from ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, and the Mesopotamian region. 🗺️🏺 The museum's treasure is a bust of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti. I wanted to look up the legendary deeds of this woman, but stories as legendary as our Wu Emperor's Zhaojun were not easily found. The introduction says that the statue was in excellent condition when unearthed and has rarely needed restoration in the 101 years since its first public appearance in 1923, which is quite convenient. 👁️‍🗨️🗝️ In this hall, only this bust is displayed, and photography is not allowed inside this room, only in areas outside of it. If this were a bust of an Egyptian pharaoh, perhaps no one would question it. But who among the living has such treatment? One would first have to be qualified to be made into a statue and remain so well-preserved after thousands of years. Some faces were also cast and displayed in the museum; they must have been somebodies, but now they are nobodies. 🗿🕊️ Nefertiti's appearance was preserved, beautiful and elegant. She still receives a continuous stream of visitors every day. I could only take a distant photo of her. Her neck is slender, her face calm and resolute, her eyes lowered. At first glance, I hardly noticed the faint glimmer of quartz in her right eye, while her left eye was not inlaid. The explanation mentioned that the missing eye indicates that this might have been just a rough model made by the sculptor at the time. At the moment I noticed this detail, the statue suddenly came to life. I thought, she must have made many wise decisions before. 👁️🗨️💡 Some of the museum's halls were bombed during World War II, so the descriptions and what you actually see may not match, but this does not detract from the artistic nature of the museum's architecture itself. 🏛️🎨 #Berlin #MustSeeExhibitions #CulturalHeritage