East Side Gallery, KaDeWe

Today was really chill. I spent the morning cleaning Ute's house and doing laundry. In the afternoon I went to the East Side Gallery, the largest remaining portion of the Berlin Wall. It was slightly disappointing, because all the original art has long since been defaced out of existence, and many of the restorations are going to. It's not at all like you see in the pictures, but it was still interesting because of it's historical significance.




After the Wall, I successfully found KaDeWe. Wow oh wow oh wow. Think shopping mall squared plus European flair times seven floors. I spent several hours on the Gourmet Floor, sampling chocolate, tasting wine, and enjoying the sights and smells. There is a shop for every possible food item: fish, pork and beef, fruit and vegetables, cheese, pasta, chocolate, wine, olives, peppers, tea and coffee, and even ketchup and salad dressing. The best part is that at most of the shops you can have something cooked fresh right there. The smell was absolutely astoundingly amazing. I had traditional German food for dinner. I don't know what I ordered, I just asked the lady what her favorite dinner was and she brought me this:

It was really really good, but very salty. I spent another few Euro on a "Chocolate Coffee": an espresso stirred into a melted chocolate bar and served with a tiny but extremely strong chocolate square. It was delicious.

Museumsinsel

Yesterday was a Feiertag (public holiday) because of Christi Himmelfahrt (Assention Day, literally "Christ's Sky Journey"). I visited three out of five Museums on Museumsinsel (Museums Island): Bode, Old National Gallery, and New Museum.



My favorite was the Old National Gallery and it's marble sculpture. A close second was the ivory collection in Bode Museum. The Egyptian collection in Old National Gallery was also interesting.



After the museums I checked out the local churches. Unfortunately, the most impressive church had bouncers for tourists so I never got inside.

How to cure jetlag

The problem with being a gradstudent is that I'm used to working at weird times and with very little sleep. This makes it extremely hard to overcome jetlag. So to get myself on local time, I decided to go for complete exhaustion. Yesterday I drank beer for lunch and dinner, and didn't eat or drink anything else all day. In the afternoon, I ran for an hour through downtown Berlin, a very exciting experience for both me and the locals. It's not every day they get to see a gigantic redhead in bright orange Virginia Tech running clothes tearing down Unter den Linden, and it's not every day I get lost in downtown Berlin. If it wasn't for the detailed maps at every bus stop, I might never have made it home! The "cure" worked a charm. I passed out at about 11:00PM and woke up at 6:45 sharp, just like home.

Reichstag, Aquarium, K. W. Gedacht. Kirche, German Beer, Döner Kebap, and Humboldt University

Today's weather was amazingly good today and I was feeling chipper, despite three hours of sleep. (I. Hate. Jetlag.)

I set off determined to get into the Reichstag Dome today, and after a 45 minute wait managed to do so. Security pulled me out of line when they detected a wrench and screwdriver in my backpack. (I'd used them earlier to adjust Ute's bike and forgot they were in there.) After explaining that I was just another stupid American and I had the passport to prove it, I was allowed into the dome.




Wow! I mean WOW! The view was absolutely beautiful. Reichstag is interesting because it is a vital political location, yet it is open to the public. In the States you can barely get into the Capital building since Sept. 11, but here there's a cafe with an amazing view right on the roof.

I visited the Berlin Aquarium next. I was hoping for a repeat of the London Aquarium, one of the high-points of my UK trip, but was slightly disappointed. The aquarium was much smaller than it was hyped for, but still very interesting. There were some fantastic jellyfish and plenty of coral. Jellyfish are vampires. You can't photograph them.



Next I went inside Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedaechtnis-Kirche. The old building's murals were beautiful but badly damaged. The new building was intact, but lacked the creativity of the old building. However, the blue light was like visual incense and very beautiful. I didn't care for the statue of Jesus much though, as it looked both dead and angry.


I spent a long time trying to find KaDeWe. With Ute it was easy, but alone it's like trying to find a particular tree in the forest. The whole district is nothing but shopping! I paused my weary quest to enjoy my first German beer: a half-liter of dark Franyiskaner Hefeweiyen. Oh wow. By far the best beer I'd had in many moons. I'm here to tell you though: under no circumstances should you drink German beer on an empty stomach and then try to decipher a map of Berlin. Resuming my search for KaDeWe I was completely confused and wound up in front of a row of strange Turkish shoppes. So I gave up my search and ate a cheap Turkish dinner: Döner Kebap with Becks beer.



I was pretty tired, but I decided to go to Museumsinsel, a cluster of museums near the middle of Berlin. It took me so long to get out of the shopping district though, that I gave up and went to Humboldt University instead. The place where Hitler burned the University library is marked by a window into the old library, now full of nothing but empty shelves. It was very touching.

Museumsinsel am Morgen! As before, more photos here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2132166&l=96e87&id=6226307

Berlin, Take 2

Unaccustomed as I am to retarded operating systems, I wrote long and thoughtfully about my second day in Berlin until Windows Vista happily crashed. I went to bed, but I am also unaccustomed to 6-hour jet lag, so it's 3:00 AM and I've given up trying to sleep. Instead, I'll see what I can remember....


Ute left for Saskia early this afternoon. I carried her luggage to Hauptbanhof (Berlin's central train station) and then headed out on my own. Hauptbanhof is extremely impressive, with high-speed, inter-city, and subway trains on several floors. The whole is enclosed in a massive geometric glass structure which makes you feel like you are a pencil sketch on graph paper. Way cool.

Ute gave me two letters to mail, but didn't say how to recognize a German mailbox. After almost depositing them in a trashcan, I had to ask a local what a mailbox was. I then discovered that German mailboxes are rather complex (at least in Berlin) and can actually print stamps. Chances are, I actually stuck the letters in some kind of souvenir printing machine. Sorry Ute...


My first stop was Checkpoint Charlie, where in 1961 the Soviets and the United States had a tense little tank stand-off for 16 hours before JFK reached a diplomatic solution. It was strange to stand there and think that only 46 years ago the world as we know it almost ended. I never before appreciated just how cool JFK was. There are bits of the Berlin wall on display. An old Soviet propaganda pamphlet proudly proclaims the wall as the "8th wonder of the world." I think Komrad Kurt is perhaps trinking not da same vodka as I be trinking.


From Checkpoint Charlie, I wandered down Under den Linden to Brandenburger Tor. Brandenburger Tor is the gateway between East and West Berlin and has just been restored. The East and West are no longer easily distinguishable, since most of the Eastern architecture has been completely rebuilt in the Western style. (No loss by all accounts.) But East Berlin still has streetlights fitted for gas (though they use electric) and the crosswalks are signaled by little green and red silhouette boys in official hats, which is kinda cute.



From Brandenburger Tor I walked to Reichtstag, the home of the German parliament. Reichstag is an enormous, beautiful building covered in sculpture and intricate stone work. On top is a massive transparent dome which tourists would excitedly ascend to gaze down on the city, were it not for the hundreds of excited tourists queued up to ascend the dome. Better luck next time! Reichstag was somehow important when it caught fire and gave excuse for the Nazi revocation of basic human rights (my German was not good enough to completely understand the connection there).



I took a bus from Reichstag toward the massive Berlin Tierpark (zoo) and stopped at Hotel Berlin. From there I walked to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedaechtnis-Kirche, a famous new church built next to the impressive ruins of an old cathedral which was bombed out of existence by the Allies during WWII. The church had closed when I got there, but the sunset turned the ruins a beautiful rose color.


I needed money for a train ticket back to Ute's apartment, so I walked over to the Reisebank (currency exchange) a few blocks away. I found it next to Berlin's 5th most visited museum: the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum devoted entirely to sex of every kind. The museum is three floors of pornographic sex education, but alas, this institution's gainful and valuable collection was outside my academic relm, making a complete inventory an unjustified waste of university resources. However the anatomically correct homosexual mannequins in the window displays were quite informative. I have all sorts of new associations with Speedos.

The German mentality is hilarious when it comes to traffic regulations. There are an astounding number of cyclists in Berlin, and they happily weave in and out of full speed traffic. American cyclists supposedly have the same rights as motor vehicles (a little known fact), but for fearing for their lives, stay carefully out of the way. In Berlin, everyone acts as if they could actually see a car there. Ironically, many Germans don't wear helmets.

The other thing is crosswalks. Many streets don't have them, so pedestrians cross wherever they like regardless of personal safety. However on streets with crosswalks, pedestrians will patiently wait until they are given permission to go, even if the street is completely empty. I saw one old Nordic Walker, complete with shoes, scarf and hat in 80-degree weather, who got half way across the walk, realized the light was red, and turned around and went back.

Tomorrow I'll try to get into the Reichstag dome and the Berlin aquarium. You can see all my photos here: http://vt.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2132166&l=0616d&id=6226307

Berlin!

Well, I've made it! 1:20PM I left Dulles air port for JFK, and from there to Berlin. The flight was good, but very bumpy. My good friend Ute Triesscheijn (pronounced Oo-ta Tree-shine) picked me up at the air port 10:00 AM Berlin local time the next day (2 hour flight, 4 hour layover, 7 hour flight, 2 hour delay in JFK). We spent the rest of the day in a whirlwind Berlin tour. Checkpoint Charlie! Brandenburg Tor! Reichstag! Unter den Linden! KaDeWe! Berliner Dom! It feels like a dream here. We had dinner in a nice cafe near Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin, and I discovered authentic sauerkraut, white asparagus, Gaswasser, and what the locals call "tepid potato salad with vinegar", which was quite nice. I'm smashed but looking forward to tomorrow! I'll post some pictures soon as I know how to charge an American battery on a German power circuit.....