We were told that THE museum to visit in Berlin was the Pergamon Museum. I expected a standard museum full of standard museum stuff. And, yes, there were places like that in this museum. But I was surprised.

The museum got its name because someone in the late 1800s noticed that people were hacking up limestone and burning it to make whatever it is that you get from burning limestone. It took him a lot of time and letters, but finally a German archaeologist came to Turkey and saved the rest of this huge altar. It had a giant frieze of the Greek gods battling the Titans.  They built the museum to hold the treasures and named it after the Greek town. 

I am not sure what the early museum holding the treasures looked like. It must have been inferior because they tore it down. This latest building is a keeper, though. They built the museum to hold them life-sized!

 

Okay, that’s not 100% true. This is the room where the altar was displayed. They wrapped the frieze around the walls and made the columns only about quarter-sized. But it was still really impressive! 

 

The next room DID have a a real-size thing. It was a market gate from Miletus.

 

That was really neat, and it was exceptionally fancy, even for ancient-times market gates. There were even some advertisement carved into it, said the audio guide. A barber and a few others had written their names, but I couldn’t find the ancient words to take a picture. 

 

 

 

The room after that had a spacious feel. It should have. Look how high the ceiling was!

 

The room was laid out with a mosaic tile and a statue. I thought the floor would be the neatest point. 

The audio guide told the story of the gazillions of little tiles that went into making this floor. And they were TINY tiles. Take a Tylenol and cut it in thirds. That’s about the average size of the tiles. My favorite part was that the floor maker signed his work in a fun way.

It looks like someone dropped a piece of paper on the floor and it is blowing away, but it is all in tile.  

But, it turned out that for me, the floor was not the best part. It was this statue.

What’s the big deal? Well, Homeschool Moms. Did you ever read Theras and His Town by Caroline Dale Snedeker when you were teaching Greece? Remember little Athenian Theras and his great love for the statue of Athena in the city of Athens? Well, this is it! This is Theras’ Athena!  The audio guide said that is is a Roman copy of the now-destroyed original. It was gold and gleaming white when made, they said. 

I wish I had the book with me so I could quote it and how Theras loved the face of the good and wise goddess. But that’s just literature. I’d rather praise our good and wise God!

Speaking of Bible things, the next thing we saw was the Ishtar Gate. What’s that? It’s the main gate in Babylon during Nebuchadnezzar’s time!

  

 

Yes, THE Nebuchadnezzar. Maybe Daniel walked under this archway? Maybe he supervised workman making it?

Below is an inscription from the gate written by Nebuchadnezzar II. I don’t know what it says. 

 

 

Lions were the royal symbol, and there were lots of them. But no one mentioned the daisies. What was with that?  There were lots of them everywhere.

    

 

Next, we saw some Assyrian stuff. 

I didn’t take many pictures because I was disdainful. We saw these two Assyrian lion-like creature things. I said, “Hey, those look just like the ones in the British Museum!” Then, I read that they were copies of the ones in the British Museum. I felt that the British Museum was superior on all things Assyrian, so I didn’t take any more pictures in the Assyrian room. 

I did take pictures of something that intrigued me. At first, I took the picture because the two guys were bowing down to pen and paper. I didn’t know they had ancient gods of pen and paper.

 

Then, the audio guide went on to explain that the two people in the image are identical. Therefore, they believe they are the same person. First the person is standing, then kneeling. It’s the first cartoon strip or animation or whatever you might want to call it ever recorded!

 

I have totally forgotten what this is, but it was also big. Look! There is James standing in front of it to prove that this…carved stone thing was really big!

 

The third part of this museum was devoted to Islamic art. As you may or may not know, Islam forbids making a person or animal in their art because it smacks of idol worship. I was surprised to see that very early Islamic art was similar to Roman art with the figures and all. It quickly changed to what you would expect.

 

        

Soon, we came to Rachel and Michael’s favorite part of any museum!

 

But I was looking forward to seeing more!

What visit to Berlin would be complete without messing about with the government?  We thought ours would not be, so we registered online to be able to tour the Reichstag, the German Parliament.  We had to leave the apartment at 7:45 am to have enough time with all our train travel to get there for our 9 am visit. Libby was feeling pretty horrible after her encounter with the concrete slab, so she stayed limping around the apartment while we did our tour.

The building was built in 1894. There was a big fire in 1933, and it was pretty badly damaged by WW2 bombs.  They sort of patched it up, but they didn’t bother really rebuilding it properly until German reunification in 1990. In 1999, the building as it is today was finished.  

 

Above the main doors is the inscription, “Dem Deutschen Volke,” which of course means, “Dem Dutch Folks.” (Or maybe it means, “To the German People.”)

And now, I wish to share an incredibly embarrassing story with you.

Hearken back to the summer of 1985 (oh shush, those of you not-yet-born!). I was a fifteen year old from Curwensville, PA. My knowledge of the world was rather limited. My boyfriend (we went to the Prom, we dated, I can use that term, right?) went to Germany for a month or so over the summer. He came back with a book of beautiful views Germany (which I believe was called Beautiful Views of Germany) and a lovely necklace in a box. On the box was this:

 

My mom looked at him and said, “Oh, what does that mean?”  

Arrogantly stupid me piped up, “Oh, is that like Disneyland or something?” 

He looked very pained. “No, that’s ‘Germany’ in German. That’s the symbol of their country.” 

I felt very stupid. I still feel very stupid about it. 

 

Okay, back to present day! 

You may have wondered what I meant by “registered” to tour. Since this is a working government building, you must register online with name, address, and all that. Then, you choose a time to come. We arrived at our time, had our names checked off a list, passports verified, and we went through airport-like security. Then they gave us official cards to wear. 

 

We went up in an elevator (with an elevator attendant even!), got audio guides, and were turned loose in the glass dome.  

The glass dome is pretty cool. It was built to replace the old, traditional dome that sadly had a bomb put through it.  It serves a number of purposes. 

1. It’s cool. Tourists like to visit it.

2. It’s a big window.

3. It has some sort of solar collection in it, so it also helps to heat or cool or whatever.

4. It’s symbolic. The glass on the top of the building shows the transparency of the German government. And, indeed, you can peer down the central part of the dome and see the parliament hard at work!

 

The audio guides were controlled by hidden sensors in the floor.

The kids figured it out. Whenever we’d cross a lighter gray panel, the audio guide would kick in and say, “Stop here and look for the building that looks like…”  That way, we got a good tour of Berlin’s rooftops. 

 

The audio guide also told us about the glass dome and the government. One neat thing about the dome is that the very top is open. So rain and snow can come right in. They are collected into a big funnel and then something is done with it. (I don’t know what, though. Maybe it was just a big rain gutter?)

 

 

Also, the sides of the building were open, so it was not a solid fishbowl or anything.   I am sure on a sunny, warm day, it is delightful. But on the cold, drizzly day we were there, it was pretty chilly. 

 

       

I think the Reichstag Dome is a good symbol for what the German government would like to be: transparent, looking to the future, and eco-friendly. It makes me wonder what would be a good architectural style or construction to symbolize me. Or what about to symbolize you? 

 

One of the outside places I wanted to visit in Berlin was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It’s really close to the Brandenburg Gate area, so it wasn’t much trouble to walk there. I knew it was outside, but I didn’t know what to expect. 

This is someone else’s picture of the memorial taken from above. 

It took a year and a half to build it, and it was officially opened to the public in 2005.  Wikipedia says, “It consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or stelae, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 7 ft 10 in long, 3 ft 1 in wide and vary in height from 8 inches to 15 feet 9 inches. According to Eisenman’s project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.”

 

In addition to what Eisenman wanted, they made a wicked cool hide and seek tag area!  

            

 

I was walking around through this orderly maze on an undulating pathway and thinking, “This would be an awesome place to play hide and seek!”  Then, I noticed my kids WERE playing hide and seek tag.  I felt guilty about this. Here we are, stupid Americans in a Holocaust memorial running around and playing tag. But then, I realized that is what every other visitor to the site was doing–teens, parents, grandparents, toddlers. And some were speaking German, so they weren’t all stupid Americans.  

The passages were narrow and it was impossible to see around the stelae. You had to stay in the center where the slabs were the tallest, because it’d be easy to find someone in the 8 inch high area. 

As the old saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets body checked into the side of a 15-foot tall concrete slab,” and that adage proved true for us. Libby and Rachel collided, and Libby’s leg and shoulder and side paid the price.  Poor thing, it hurt so much, she had tears in her eyes.  Some people wandered by and stared at her, probably wondering if she was overcome by the sorrow that the place should have evoked or if she had a bruise the size of a grapefruit forming on the side of her thigh.  I just let them wonder. 

Berlin is a huge city full of dining options. They even have a whole museum devoted to the Currywurst. (And it’s expensive to get into that museum!) What is a curry wurst? It’s a sausage cut into slices and seasoned with curry-flavored ketchup and is sold by street vendors. Apparently 800 MILLION servings of currywurst are sold in Germany a year. And it is now a tradition that every candidate for mayor in Berlin is photographed by a currywurst stand. 

 

Did I try a currywurst? Well, I don’t much like greasy sausage, am skeptical about street vendors, and I dislike the taste of curry. Plus, I never saw Ye Olde Currywurst Wagon. Otherwise, I might have tried one.  Maybe I could have gotten one near Checkpoint Charlie at this place?

 

Most train stations seemed to have a bakery in them. Libby and I were amused by the name of this chain of bakeries.

Yes, I realize it’s just “croissant” and “baguette” put together, but it sounds like something you’d need on a plane if you got sick to your stomach.  

 

Where did WE eat while in Berlin? I packed food, so we had breakfasts in our apartment. Lunch was always at the train station. Burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, whatever. So our only adventures were for supper. 

The first night, Michael suggested Burger King (again), but the girls and I protested. We wanted a REAL restaurant! With one thing and another (rain, Libby getting hurt (see next entry), and hunger), we went to the closest acceptable place. 

When my mom and I were on our cruise,  when we hit Mexico, we said, “Boy! I’m starved. I could go for a good sauerkraut and wienerschnitzel plate, and Casa de Playa looks like the PERFECT place for that!” (Serve that with a side of sarcasm…) So it seemed only fair that when we were in Germany, we’d eat Mexican.  

 

It turned out that those Berliners make a pretty mean chicken enchilada! Yum. 

 

The next day, we had some water in a yogurt shop that had basil growing in boxes on the table.

 

We should have had frozen yogurt because, as the wooden table proclaimed,

 

It turns out it was good that we didn’t eat any snacks because we found an ITALIAN restaurant for supper!

 

And it had the most delicious food, really and truly. I had penne pasta in a tomato cream sauce with mushrooms, chicken, and cherry tomatoes. It was one of those meals that is so good you keep thinking about and saying, “Remember that delicious (insert food item) we had in (insert place)?”

Germany also has good chocolate. I had this one, and I ate the entire thing on the train. Sadly, our local grocery carries Ritter chocolate, but not this berry and hazelnut kind that was amazingly delicious. 

 

But, just so you know, I still miss Jax. 

While going from busy subway station to busier subway station, Libby stopped walking and said, “What is that?” She bent down and picked up something from the ground. It was a 100 Euro note!  

We formed a little circle around her. “Is it real?” “I bet it’s fake!” But it looked to be the real deal. 

James and I looked at each other and looked around at the people thronging past us. There was no ticket booth nor information desk, and no one appeared to be looking for anything on the ground. 

“I guess it’s yours!” we said and headed on our way with a smiling daughter. 

 

 

What would you have done? 

The Berliner Dom, or Berlin Cathedral, is the first non-Catholic church we visited on our trip. It’s not properly a cathedral, as a true cathedral is the seat of a bishop. And if you aren’t Catholic, then it’s pretty hard to get a bishop’s seat.  Instead, it’s a “Supreme Parish and Cathedral Church” of the Evangelical Church.

Unlike many of the other churches we’ve seen, this one isn’t super-old. There were other churches, but they kept tearing them down and building new ones. The current building was built in 1905 in “high neo-renaissance style.” At the time, there was no separation of church and state, so the state paid the complete construction cost of 11.5 million Marks.  It is 374 feet long, 240 feet wide and 381 feet tall. People thought it was the Protestant “counterbalance” to the Vatican in Rome.

Like most things in Berlin, the cathedral did not escape damage during WW2. In 1940, the windows got blown out. In 1944, a bomb was dropped through the dome and caused a big fire. Reconstruction began in 1975, but it wasn’t completed until 1993. 

Of course, it was pretty inside.

 

 

The front had three stained glass panels. Here’s a close up of one.

I noticed that it differed from the Catholic churches we had visited. For one, the organ was on the left-side wall instead of opposite the main altar area.

     

For another, there were statutes of Calvin and Zwingli!  They were posed pointing to the Bible to emphasize “Solo Scriptura”–that it was the Word of God, not the traditions of church or man, that would show the way to salvation.

   

 

Above the doors you walk into was the “royal box.” This didn’t look very exciting. (it’s the area above and behind the girls.)

But we were able to go into the choir loft, which pretty much looked like the royal box. 

 

I don’t know what the name of this thing is. I’ve seen them in big churches before. But I wanted you to see the scale of things. That’s my six-foot tall son, Michael, standing next to it. (You can see the organ to the upper left in the picture.)

 

Even though “Dom” means “Cathedral,” it seems like it would have been mis-named if it didn’t have an actual dome. But it did!

  

The dome was decorated with mosaics depicting the Beatitudes.  I couldn’t get a very good picture of the mosaics. But there were lots of other mosaics in the church.  They had Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

 

 

And just a lot of pretties. 

  

 

In the cathedral, you could go up or you could go down. Up took you to the roof! There are 272 steps to get to the top of the cathedral. 

    

But the view from the roof was pretty cool. 

   

Someone made this heart in the grass. We weren’t sure how. Driving bikes through the yard?

On the way up, we passed a room full of broken things. It reminded me that this cathedral has gone through a lot. 

 

But, what happened if you went down those steps?  You’d wind up in the crypt. There were a lot of royal graves here. Remember the Hohenzollern family who were sent by the Pope to help protect Berlin from pirates? Well, they are the folks buried here.  

 

           

 

Now, my astute readers may be asking some questions about this crypt, such as, “If the place kept getting torn down, how old is this place?” Or, “What about that fire?” From the looks of things, this was a new crypt. And the audio guide said that a lot of the coffins (some marble, some tin, some wood) were damaged in the fire and were still being restored. 

Can you imagine if this were the basement of YOUR church? (Someone would probably want to put an AWANA circle down there.)

 

I don’t know why I liked this seated figure so well. I’m not sure who he is supposed to be, but to me, he was an angel saying, “Stop. Consider this cross. Consider these graves. Where are you going after you die? And how will you spend eternity?”

 

 

 

There was a wall in Berlin, but that wasn’t built until 1961. Before that, there was a wall AROUND Berlin. It was built in around 1730 as a defense for the city of Berlin (remember those pirates of earlier times?).  And that wall didn’t have checkpoints. It had gates. 

The Brandenburg Gate (“tor” is the German word for “gate”) was not one of the original gates in the city. It was built to represent peace.  So, the guardhouses that were there were replaced by the impressive 12 Doric columns and five passageways. The design was based on the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens. On top of the gate is a statue of Victory in a chariot drawn by four horses.  I liked the way the horses looked like they were sort of scared they were going to fall off the edge. 

 

If you look through the gate, you can see rows of trees on either side of the street. That’s the famous “Unter de Linden” aka “That big, long street with a lot of linden trees.” It used to lead up to the Prussian Palace, but now it leads to the Victory Column. We were going to walk the street to the column, but it was a half-hour walk in cold, spitting rain and strong winds. So we said, “Yep, there it is.  Okay, back to the underground!”

First, we took pictures at the gate. 

  

 

Some clown was photo bombing people’s pictures. 

 

See how tall it is?

 

 

And after that, we saw a street was closed. And then all these police came down the road. And then a lot of black cars and a black limo. And then more police and more!  We have no idea who it was, but it was exciting! 

Our two days touring Berlin were both supposed to be cold and maybe rainy. Thursday looked better than Friday (online, at least), so we decided to do “Outdoors Berlin” on the first day. Our first stop? Dunkin’ Donuts.

 

Our first REAL stop? Checkpoint Charlie!

Now remember, the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in East Germany from sneaking off into Western Germany where freedom and McDonald’s awaited. But, there were checkpoints to get through the wall. The most famous was Checkpoint C, and C in the phonetic alphabet is “Charlie” (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…) It was where tanks faced each other in this iconic photo of 1961′s Berlin Crisis.

(There was a crisis in Berlin in 1961? Yes, it was over the communists wanting the city all to themselves. This is an iconic photo? It must be. It was on tons of postcards.)

It turns out that it was a good thing our first stop was at Dunkin’ Donuts. We had an extra one, and James gave it to the guard. He was very grateful and chatted with us for a long while and stamped a “passport” for us with all sorts of stamps. 

 

Now, an astute reader would say, “Guards? What sort of guards? This checkpoint has been abandoned!” Well done. They are actors. For 2 Euro a person, you can pose with them.  You can go over to the actual building for free and peek in the windows, but there wasn’t much to see. Just a picture of some guy and some poster that was impossible to read. I wondered if on warm days, they brought it out or something? 

They left the signs up that warned people of which side of the wall they were on. Not that you’d probably need to be told which side was which. If guns were pointed at you to keep you from crossing, you were on the East side. If there was a bunch of graffiti, you were on the West side.

 

These days, instead of guards, they have large photos of an American soldier and a Russian soldier surveying the territory, one on each side of a sign. 

 

 

      

 

The wall might not be there, but they remember. 

Ronald Reagan famously said:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same–still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar…

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!  

(Except leave part of it up because it will make a cool place for tourists to walk and take pictures, okay?)

 

When one hears “Berlin,” the “Berlin Wall” pops to mind. It was torn down in 1989, but they did leave part of it up as an art gallery cleverly named “The Berlin Wall East Side Gallery.” It was a commissioned work by 105 artists who painted on the east side of the wall. (The west side was already painted on by those Graffiti-loving West Berliners.) Not surprisingly, many of the paintings were destroyed by graffiti and had to be repainted, which really ticked off a lot of the famous artists who painted them in the first place. 

You can see the gallery on the left side of this picture. 

And you can see it even closer in the left side of this picture.

 

This was the first panel we came to. With all the signatures there, I thought it probably was a place provided for people to sign their names. We’ve seen similar things in museums, and the museums even provided pens! 

 

 

But then, right next to this wall panel was this notice:

OH NO! At least they don’t know who we are or anything!

 

AAAH! No, Libby! NOOOOO!  

 

Anyhow, let’s tour the wall, graffiti and all.

              

 

This image was all over bags and shirts and postcards and all that.

 

What is it? Well, on the 30th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (aka East Germany), the guest of honor at the party was Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. When Brezhnev finished his speech, East German President Erich Honecker opened his arms to congratulate him with a big kiss, a normal ritual for socialist comrades.  But they were a bit too enthusiastic, apparently, leading to decades of mocking and this image called “The Kiss” (which was based on a photo). Yeah, I don’t much like it either. 

 

    

 

This was cool. Depending on your angle, they looked like fun scribbles. But seen straight on, they were faces! 

 

  

 

       

 

This was our favorite part of the wall. Rachel wanted a poster of it, but we had to settle for a mug and a postcard. 

 

     

 

And it started drizzling…but we had more outside stuff to do!

 

   

 

On Wednesday, the family and I hopped a train for the eight-hour train trip from Linz to Berlin.  We wanted to visit Germany, and we chose Berlin because it is the capital and also because the man from whom we rent our apartment in Linz also has a place for rent in Berlin, so it made finding a place to stay easy.  I didn’t know what to expect from Berlin. I know there was a wall there, and there was Hitler stuff, but other than that, what did I really know about the place? 

 

Since I didn’t know much, I decided to learn. And you get to learn along with me! Berlin is a  ”new” city in Europe, only getting its start in the 1200s. It was built on the banks of the Spree River (which still runs through the city today). Pirates kept attacking the town, so in 1411 Berlin asked for protection from the Pope. He sent Fredrich von Hohenzollern, Burggraf of Nuremberg, and his army. (What do you want to be when you grow up, Little Bobby? I wanna be a Burggraf!).  The Hohenzollerns wound up being the rulers of Berlin and a lot of Germany for a few hundred years. They founded the German Reich in 1871 which was around the time they finally defeated the French, who had been hassling them for quite awhile. 

Losing WW1 sort of flabbergasted the Germans, so they decided to go with a new sort of government and booted the imperialists in favor of a democratic constitution. Things went along okay until Hitler marched in in 1933 and imposed military rule. It rather ruined the 1936 Olympic games and also the lives of 50,000 Jews.  The city’s population took quite a hit as well.  Only two-and-a-half million of Berlin’s four million inhabitants were left after the fighting ended.  (I don’t think they ALL died, but a lot abandoned the city, perhaps?)  

After WW2, Berlin was divided into four parts: the Soviet Union, United States, Britain, and France. By 1948, the United States had claimed West Germany, and the Soviet Union had assumed control of East Germany. (I guess the other two went home?) Berlin’s location in the east of Germany caused problems since the country was split east/west. The democracies wanted to keep some hold on Berlin, but what to do since it was in the east? In 1961, the Soviets built a wall dividing the city in half, which remained until 1989. At this point, the western capital moved to Bonn while the Soviet occupiers stayed in Berlin. 

In 1989, the border between the two countries was opened, and the citizens started hacking down the wall themselves. In 1991, they voted to move the capitol back to Berlin, but they didn’t get around to actually moving the offices until 1999. I guess packing took a long time? 

There was a lot about Prussia I didn’t quite understand when I read (er, skimmed) the history, and we failed to make it to any of the “History of Berlin” museums. But I think in the 1700s and 1800s Germany was more like we think of Russia–it was a country, but it was also the general name of a whole group of countries? Maybe? (There is reason no one asks me to write history books.)

Anyhow, back to real time. 

Before we went, our New Friends, the Moores, had us over for pizza and to watch a Rick Steve’s travel DVD of Berlin, so we were able to look for a few things, like these:  

 

  

These Walk and Don’t Walk traffic light men are unique to East Berlin. I am not sure why they are so beloved, but when the city was going to standardize the crossing signals, there was quite a furor, so they mean something to Berliners. 

Another thing Rick Steves pointed out was this television tower. It’s called the Fernsehturm, and it was built between 1965-69 and is the tallest structure in Germany. 

What Steves pointed out was that the East Germans built this during the time they were tearing down all the crosses from the cathedrals and churches. But, when the sun strikes their tower, it shines in the image of a cross.  It’s nicknamed “The Pope’s Revenge.” 

Ronald Reagan talked about it in his Tear Down This Wall speech:  “Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexanderplatz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower’s one major flaw: treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere, that sphere that towers over all Berlin, the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.”

What were MY impressions of Berlin? Well, the first thing Berlin offered to me was the answer to a question that’s been burning in my brain ever since my son David asked it. “What do they call a footlong Subway sub in countries that don’t use inches?” 

 

The answer? It’s a 30 cm. And a six-inch is a 15 cm.  Plus, the Subway in Berlin served Walkers crisps. Yum.

 

My second impression was “Dang, this city is full of graffiti!”

 

     

Every surface seemed to be covered in spray paint. It seemed to be a contagious infection. I longed to spray my name on some cement surface! Although, escalators, walls, and even ticket kiosks did not escape. 

Berlin itself seemed to realize this. On the East Wall Gallery (which I’ll talk about later), one of the paintings shows four windows.

 

And how did Berlin describe itself?

 

Yep. That’s about right! 

Most of Berlin was dirty. There was dirt and garbage and a lot of construction. The buildings themselves seemed run-down and sad. And there were random water pipes that just ran above ground. What was with that?

    

And when we’d walk down the street, we’d get this occasional whiff of open sewer from the sewer vents. It was like Camp K on a bad day!   

 

Berlin was much larger than I thought. It took us an hour by three trains to get from our apartment to any of the touristy places we wanted to go. So we did a lot of this. 

    

To sit on this (many trains smelled like pee and were pretty worn out looking)

 

Now, with all this negative nonsense, you would think I didn’t like the place. But, I did!  The people there were kind and friendly and helpful, which I did not expect. I was told that in general, Germans were more haughty than Austrians. I don’t believe that. We had total strangers come up to us and offer to help us when we were staring at maps or trying to puzzle out what a German word meant. (Behinderte means “handicapped,” in case you wondered.) And Berlin had wonderful museums and the best food we’ve had and more.  But, I’ll get to that in later entries.