June 27, 2023 to July 1, 2023
Berlin in Four Days and the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I am writing this entry a week late and so much has happened - or not happened- just depending on your point of view. It’s been a tale of the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good: We had four great days in Berlin. I had only spent one night here ten years ago and Dave had never been here, so we scheduled time to enjoy the City and we did. We stayed in the Prenzlauer Berg district, just a little north of the Mitte (center) at the Myers Hotel. This area and the hotel is a Rick Steves recommendation and we understand why. It’s a charming, pleasant but not overly upscale neighborhood that’s in a great location, with lots of small restaurants, cafes etc. There is a very convenient tram so if you’re not in the mood to walk or ride a mile to Alexanderplatz - more or less the center of Berlin - it’s a five minute tram ride.
The cultural diversity and energy was noticeable. We had a British tour guide on our walking tour, a Syrian tour guide on our bike tour, and an Albanian Uber driver. The first night we dressed up in our best clothes (pretty much our only clothes) and had a signature meal at Volt, which is an edgy restaurant in an old electrical power plant. It was great. After all, we need to get our quota of sweetbreads when we travel in Europe. We also did the wine pairing, which was fun because Dave especially loves talking wine. We managed public transport on the way to dinner (two changes - a lot for us) but Ubered back and had an interesting conversation with our Albanian driver, who opined at length about the differences between Germans and Italians. It was the usual: Germans love rules and Italians don’t have any!
The following morning we visited the Museum at the Kulturbrauerei which is an exhibit about life in the GDR (East Germany) between 1948 and 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. We got a lot of small details out of it. Primarily there were shortages for the entire period; bread and milk was cheap and subsidized so nobody starved but there were very few luxuries. The economy was centralized with these made-up Five Year Plans for production that had no basis in reality. Manufacturing quotas could never be met because of a shortage of parts. The housing shortage was the most severe. You only got assigned a flat if you were signed up to do some job that the Five Year Plan thought was important, which pretty much screwed over women since they were rarely given the jobs considered a priority. On the other hand, there was no unemployment and the government funded day care and nurseries allowing women to work. There has been a nostalgia movement for East Germany in the last few years now that everyone has been exposed to the new unified Germany. Afterwards, we reflected about what the museum did NOT cover; namely, there was no mention of the Stasi - the secret police that had thousands of “volunteer” informers - or of the Berlin Wall and the inability to travel outside the country for most of the population. We rented “The Lives of Others,” the 2006 foreign film about people living in East Germany: that should make all of us think about our civic freedoms and not take them for granted.
We also did a four hour walking tour around the center of Berlin. We learned some of the interesting details about Hitler’s bunker where he committed suicide in April 1945 (the site is now a car park), along with some funny stories about how people successfully managed to escape to West Berlin, ie; a family went across on a home made zip line while another family went across in a hot air balloon they made by sewing together rain jackets. (Soon after that escape, rain jackets were banned!) There were many sad stories about people being separated for years. We also learned that four hours is too long for our brains to handle; that night at dinner we were so tired we could barely talk to each other. It wasn’t the walking a much as the information overload.
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The following day we did a six hour bike ride to explore the Berlin Wall. Although it was an organized tour, we were the only ones on it so we had our own private guide. The cycling in Berlin is great - as we have generally experienced all over Germany. A bike ride tour proved easier for us; the highlight was riding through Tempelhof airport which is no longer an airport but a big park used by Berliners for recreational purposes. It also has a “container” refugee camp being used right now to house Ukrainian refugees; it was constructed for the earlier Syrian crisis and once the Syrians moved out the Ukrainians moved in. Tempelhof has a famous history; Hitler rebuilt it in the 1930s and then it was used for the Berlin Airlift in 1948 when the Soviets blockaded Berlin by train and road. The US flew round-the-clock aid into Berlin for 11 months to keep the City from starving and once the Soviets saw the US was serious, it relented. That effort — according to our guide — lead to the creation of air traffic control systems because the number of planes flying in and out were constant.
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That night we saw “Turandot” at the Deutsch Opera Berlin; I had booked the tickets in January. We read up on the story that afternoon and — as David noted is true with most operatic plot lines — it was a ridiculous plot with a bunch of people running around doing really stupid stuff for no reason at all. But the music was wonderful, moving. The staging was, well, interesting. The opera was set in modern day times and the staging was bare but still engaging enough. Turandot was Pucini’s last opera and he actually died before finishing it. For this reason producers feel free to put in their own ending and the one in this particular version was extremely puzzling, leaving us to still be talking about it several days later. Mostly because it made no sense….
Then a highlight of our visit was meeting up with Uli and Daniel. We met them this February when we were in the Ecuadorian rainforest and they were in our small group of eight on our daily hikes. They were kind enough to come in to Berlin- they live on the outskirts in a beautiful country home that they built - and we visited the Klimt exhibit at the Alte National Gallery and then had an authentic German meal at a pub. They are serious world travelers and we definitely felt put in our place! It was interesting getting their perspective on various world issues. They supported the need to defend Ukraine, the necessity to decommission the nuclear power plants and thought the subway in Berlin was really a pain! I think the last opinion was driven by the fact there is lots of construction in Berlin right now interfering with the smooth running of public transportation. Anyway, thank you Uli and Daniel for hosting us!
So, we had a really good visit to a wonderful City.
And now, on to the bad and the ugly…..
Today's ride: 40 km (25 miles)
Total: 195 km (121 miles)
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10 months ago