In case you haven’t figured it out, many of these posts have been written from memory after the fact, but as if I had been writing all along. That said, J’s visit is a bit of a blur, so I’ll do my best but may be a little less detailed than usual… I’m sure that’s a relief from some perspectives 🙂
So Monday we took it easy… woke up for the included hotel breakfast, which was actually quite delicious. Breakfast buffets in Germany are quite different, and I was surprised to find that pancakes and waffles are totally absent from the morning meal. “Lunch meat” and sandwiches are what it’s all about. And they have crazy meat (that’s what she said). There’s something that looks like a piece of bacon but is more like lunch meat in consistency and has all the fat in a linear strip on the end. There’s a few things that look like bologna but with little pieces of actual meat in it. They do salami’s and ham, not really roast beef, turkey, or chicken. They have cereal and usually take it with warm milk, but I managed to get some cold… and fresh cut fruit as well. The star of the show was Kugel Kuchen (bowl cake I think?) It was like a bundt cake that was more of a butter/vanilla cake with specs of chocolate or something in it. Outstanding. Me and J were all over it.ÂÂ
After some food and laziness, we rolled out and went to check out the bombed out church, I guess they left it bombed out because they thought it looked cool. Go Berliners. After that we went to the Europa center, which is basically like a mall… but in Europe the malls are all unique and not so cookie cutter. Most of them have restaurants with tables that spill out into the mall just like it was outdoor seating. We also found a huge Best Buy type store called Saturn which had like 5-6 floors of electronics and gadgets, pretty cool. We also grabbed some ice cream… and I don’t know if it’s just an error of perception, but even with ice cream we noticed that it tastes more natural, less sweet, and better. J had some strawberry ice cream that tasted like actual strawberries and not some artificial mockup. Mmmmmmmmmm… Mmm.
After that we went to the zoo, which was actually pretty awesome. It felt more like a nature park that they turned into a zoo… the zoos I’ve been to in America have a lot more concrete and concreted enclosures. I think the main difference was just the amount of foliage. There were a lot of tree covered walkways, there were sculptures and a pond/river. Just lovely, the animals were about the same as what you’d see but they had a bunch of them. Another fun thing to note is they actually had cows there. Don’t usually see cows at the zoo, but I guess they are rarer in Europe?
After some dinner we just walked around and took it easy… Tuesday we went hardcore touristy… went to the Reichstag which is where parliament meets and also has this cool architecture including this spiral dome thing called the coopula(spelling?)… the building is huge and the line to get in was about 90 minutes, but we asked at a small information booth and the girl told us that they do a 45 minute group lecture and one of the groups attending cancelled, so if we wanted we could walk past everyone waiting and hear the lecture and then see the rest of the building after that. For free. BOOYAH SUCKA’S!! The lecture turned out to be really cool and the roof had a nice view as well. We rocked that coopula baby.
From there we walked to Brandenburg Gate to check that out, and then on to lunch where we waited for like an hour to get our food which sucked. I don’t think I’ve mentioned, but they really don’t offer you tap water at restaurants in Germany. I asked for it once and the girl actually said, “I can’t serve you tapwater.” You can buy a little glass bottle of mineral water for the same price as a beer. What a total crapshoot… we eventually learned that you can usually get tapwater after you order a real drink, but what the heck! Gah!
After lunch we did the German History museum, which had some cool stuff… I think Justin appreciated it more than I did seeing as he’s a history major and I’ve been museum’ing for a while, but it was still nice to check out. On the way out of the museum, it started to pour. And I don’t mean like a milkjug pouring, I mean complete downpour. We decided we’d give running into it a shot… and after about 3 seconds I shouted to Justin, “THIS WAS A BAD IDEA!” to which he replied “YEAH!” so we ducked into the building next door. Now I usually don’t mind walking around in rain, but in the time it took us to run one building, my shoes were soaked through and not because I stepped in a puddle or something. It was intense. Some young girls left the spot we were sheltering in to go run around in the rain… honestly I wish that I hadn’t been traveling because I would have loved to do the same… assuming I was close to home and warmth. It’s quite an awesome feeling to take a shower in the nature… and it doesn’t rain hard enough very often.
And then as if nothing had happened, it stopped after 10 minutes and the sun came out. Nutty. We grabbed a train home and didn’t do much else on Tuesday.
Wednesday we took the New Europe Free Tour in Berlin, which is awesome. They have them in a few cities and basically there’s no charge but if you think the tour was good you can tip. And the best part is, most of the guides have degrees in art history, history, architecture and seem to really just want to share their knowledge… our guide seemed like a bit of a hippy/theatre person, and was actually really cool and fun to listen to. The tour ends in the middle of Museum Island, which isn’t an island but really just a collection of museums in a cluster. We went to one called the Pergamon, which was cool.
I began to have this realization about museum browsing. The vast majority of these priceless artifacts of antiquity are really just people’s junk. Now don’t get me wrong, most of the sculptures and pottery I’ve seen took a lot of artistic talent to create… but frankly… it’s just stuff! I mean, someone took a lot of time to create… a pot! Or a beautiful wall, or a rug. But after looking at so many of them, I just began to think… oh cool, another wall, or wow there’s a coin. I feel like I should be sad about this realization, like I’m dead to culture or the human soul or something. But it really hit me when I was looking at this young girl studying an ornate tapestry rug thing. I thought to myself, “Of the two, I think the girl is far more interesting.” Hehe, now you might think that I mean that in a “Hey baby, what’s your name” way but frankly, any single human being’s life, and/or perspective seems much more interesting than any of the art and artifacts in these museums. Well maybe not every human being… errr… BAHNHOF!
I mean even thinking back on the Rosetta Stone, everyone crowds around the thing hoping to see the actual stone that recorded these amazing translations. But doesn’t the importance of the Rosetta Stone lie in the information on it, not the actual stone itself? I mean, how does actually seeing the physical thing make a lick of difference? Trust me, it looks like the pictures. Now that we’ve abosrbed it and enhanced our understanding of what it represents, it’s just a rock. Yet, I’m still glad that I saw the Rosetta Stone… maybe it’s like when you see the actual thing, it becomes more real to you. You can hear about a place or something famous and see pictures and video, but it is somewhat imaginary to you until you actually go there and use all your senses to absorb it. And in absorbing it, you can appreciate the humanity of it, the fact that actual human hands and minds combined their powers to create something wonderful. Maybe the stone itself is meaningless, but looking at it helps you connect with the people that created it. And the people who found it.
Ok, so I guess I lied about aiming for brevity. That’s right, I do what I want on my blog. Now we’re back at the hotel and we don’t have a message from the bakery chick about dinner. So if we don’t hear anything by 8, we’ll just grab some Vietnamese food! Take that Backermann! Ausgang your bahnhof on that!