September 24, 2015

 

 

Berlin Relaxed

Same story for breakfast this morning.  We will miss our kitchen as we move along, but considering the huge breakfast layouts we have had in the past there won’t be a big problem.  We’re going to split up today as Pat is going to go back to some of the WWII sites from yesterday and John and Mary are doing another geography tour of Berlin.  We’ll see if Pat contributes her report later but probably not.

We (John & Mary) go up the River Spree to visit the sites to our immediate north.  We come to a dead end at a massive construction site that is going to be the new home of the Berlin Orchestra as well as a music school.  Of course it has a huge dome.

Doing a spin move we rotate a couple blocks to Humboldt University.  We mentioned this earlier as the place where students burned 20,000 books one night in 1933 as a show of solidarity with the Nazi party.  There are students milling about but none are waving gasoline cans or lighters.  We spend some time meandering through the campus and out onto Museum Island.

This is an area between the canal by our apartment and the River that does form sort of an island.  There are rows of massive buildings with museums of various categories and eras, each more impressive than the last.  This is also the site of the Berlin Cathedral that started Catholic but wound up something altogether different—we just don’t know what.  It seems to non-denominational but it is more tourist site than church.

The area is also the neighborhood of Freiderich’s great architectural works.  The new construction including the new music hall will all be designed to fit into the style of the centuries old buildings where Freiderich still keeps his eye on the neighborhood from his perch on his bronze horse in the middle of Under bin Linden. Construction cranes are everywhere in Berlin.  As an oil-consuming, not oil producing country the German economy has certainly fared well with the recent downturn in oil prices (as opposed to Norway and Russia).  Things are hopping.

We have a new plan for our assault on dinner tonight at Zum Nussbaum.  We’re going early to beat the crowd which means just a bite of lunch to hold us over.  Just north of Alexanderplatz we grab a sidewalk table and Mary picks out a giant pretzel that is coated with Parmesan and pumpkin seeds.  It looks great but can’t live up to the appearance.  It will get us to dinner.

The rest of the afternoon is spent exploring Alexanderplatz.  The subway, the gourmet food store, the almost-ready Oktoberfest village preparing for tomorrow and various shops all make the agenda.  We have worked our way back past the Berlin City Hall into the Nickolai area and to the river.  The sun has been out all day (gasp) and it is a perfect afternoon to sit by the river at an outdoor café and sip a beer in the rare sunshine.  The tour boats on the river are packed today and all the attitudes including ours have improved.

We gather back at the apartment about 4:30 and have to have a hurried traditional cocktail before implementing our new strategy to show up early at Zum Nussbaum.  The joint is wide open and since the weather is still welcoming we take an outside table.  Our rather brusk server throws three menus on the table, we order three beers and then she disappears for 15 minutes.  We ask about our beers and she looks at us like we have three heads.  “Yah!” she says and continues with the stare with pen and pencil ready for our food order.  OK, so we order the food and after a bit she does reappear with beers.  I guess we’ve made up.

John has the pork schnitzel with a fried egg on top, salad and fried potatoes, Pat has a goulasch soup and meatball mit brod and Mary has the meatball with potato salad.  Everything was delicious so maybe the wait was worthwhile.  We almost get a smile from our server, almost.  She is waiting on about a dozen tables so there is no time to chit-chat and that seems to be the norm.  We need to lower our expectations and get over it.

It is an early wake-up in the morning so now that we have accomplished Zum Nussbaum our work in Berlin is finished.  We are packed and ready for the next phase as we set the alarms and hit the bed.

What did we learn today?  Berlin is really big.  It is the second largest city in Europe (after London) and larger that Paris, Rome etc.  Still too big for us to get our hands around but we got just a taste of the culture and a hint of the free-wheeling (see the movie Cabaret) attitude.