A Day in Berlin - 9/19/2010

Tiergarten Park

Coffee, fruit, cereal, and freshly-made croissants at the hotel and we were ready for a full day of walking tours, suggested from our tourbook, in West and East Berlin. We started off hiking though Tiergarten Park, a 412-acre wooded oasis filled with creeks and ponds and criss-crossed by small footpaths and large jogging trainls. Unexpectedly, we took quite a bit of time photographing this area. While Rick was focused on a particularly beautiful tree in the morning light and dew, I saw A tall woman in her late 50's early 60's, dressed in black trousers and a good qualilty rain jacket, come walking through the field with her little terrier of a dog. She stopped at the edge of the meadow and began throwing a ball for her dog, just itching with excitement to give chase. Sometimes though, she would stop and she would reach into a plastic sandwich bag and placed what I imagined to be a piece of bread in the palm of her hand and then hold her hand high above her hand, palm up and then talk to the birds, invisible to us, in the trees. Within a few seconds a little bird would alight onto her hand, take the bread, and then fly back to the tree.  Pretty cool.


Holocaust Memorial

Brandenberg Gate

We moved on and proceeded east to the Brandenburg Gate on the eastern border of the park. The treatment of the Gate, in recent history, serves as a microcosm for what was happening in Germany at large. The gate was originally built in 1791 during the Prussian empire. Napolean removed the gate completely in 1806. It was later rebuilt and served as the backdrop for many of HItler's speeches and Nazi ralliers in the 1930's. Then the Allies bombed the heck out of it during WWII. It was rebuilt in 1956 and then it was incorporated as part of the no-man's land that was the patrol corridor in between the two walls dividing East and West Berlin. Today it is referred to as the "Gate of Peace", "Friedenstore" in German.

Remnants of the Wall

Immediately to the south is the Holocaust monument, a unique design of a grid of cubes of varying heights, through which tourists may walk a maze and find their own path out. The design is intended to provoke contemplation rather than awe and amazement as most monuments seem to try to produce. The monument easly lent itself to some great abstract photography so we spent quite a bit of time there.

Pretzels and Doughnuts

We continued south walking in what was once the no-man's land in the partrol corridor of the Berlin wall, passed the Fuhrer's Bunker, left unmarked by the German goverment for fear that it would become the mecca of neo-nazis, and then came upon some remants of the wall up for display in Potsdamer Platz (Square). For a couple of Euro you can have your passport stamped with the seven stamps once needed to cross the border between west and east Berlin. As it is a federal offense to alter your passport, I elected not to do this, though I was tempted. Instead, I purchased a visa instead. In the square there was an organic harvest festival going on complete with hay bales and kids playing in huge bins of grain. We bought another big pretzel from a street vendor though I was sorely tempted by a humongous chocolate glazed doughnut that was as also available.

Typography of Terror Exhibit

From Potsdamer Platz we headed east until we came upon a large portion of the Berlin wall that was incorporated into a museum and exhibit called the Topography of Terror. The outdoor exhibit is an informative series of panels discussing the origins, rise, and fall of Hitler and the Nazis. I recommend this to anyone who finds themselves in Berlin. It gives a fairly detailed acount of the political and economic underpinnings of the rise of the third reich, some of which are frighteningly similar to our own circumstances in the US including the economic precursor of corruption, failing banks, fearmongering and
scapegoating, and finally, the alienation of groups of people through a series of laws and ordinances, all intended to protect the "people". In the case of the Jews, the first ordinance that set Germany on the path to persecuting the Jews and eventually, genocide, was to require the citizens to obtain identity cards. Sound familiar?

Where the Wall was at Checkpoint Charlie

After spending a couple of hours of there we proceeded further east to Checkpoint Charlie where there were yet more exhibits about the Berlin Wall and life under Nazi rule, but we were feeling a bit saturated at this point and decided to move onto a coffee shop to take a break, rest our feet, get a bite to eat, and take advantage of the free internet to check mail and update the blog posts. From there we headed north up Freidrich Strasse, lined with upscale stores and boutiques, and then east to Bebelplatz which was the site of the infamous 1933 book-burning campaign by the Nazi's.  Completing the loop we started this morning, we headed west on Linden Lane towards the Brandenburg Arch, took the requisite picture of the arch and then got out of there because, given that it was Sunday it was a zoo of odd street performances and tourists. We headed back through Tiergarten and to our hotel to clean up and rest a little dinner.

El Con Pandino Wine Bar

For dinner we decided to make our way back to northeast Berlin and wander a bit until we found something that struck our fancy. I blythely directed us to the wrong U-bahn stop and got us completely disoriented, but we soon set ourselves straight and started walkng towards the Hackescher Market in the the Scheunenviertel area recommended by the guidebook. The restaurants were pretty touristy (menus translated into English) and the food appeared to be nothing remarkable so we kept looking and found a cute wine bar called Al Con Padino serving flights of wine and small Italian dishes so we decided to give it a try. What a great decision that was.  As it turned out, this establishment, not usually opened on Sundays, was opened for a special occasion of sampling three Italian wines paired with small antipasta dishes. The fee was 20 Euros/person. We said sure. So we were seated and immediately served our first wine, a white with just a hint of a blush. It was quite tastey but we were afraid to drink too much of it while before we were served he antipasta pairing. We soon realized that we were waiting for the whole restaurant to be seated, which wasn't that big, before the serving of the antipasti which appeared to begin at 7:00. We happily discovered that, the host, Massimo, kept refilling our glasses as we slowly drained them.



The Evening's Unique Musical Entertainment



Seven o'clock arrived and to our surprise, we discovered that there was also a floorshow. The entertainment consisted of an 86-year old man, taking a bow to a metal contraption that he himself created. I can't describe it so please see the picture. He was accompanied by a young man on a variety of drums. The best way I can describe it is that it created in me the same feeling that is created by the chants of Tibetan Monks or Peter Gabriel's soundrack to the movie "Rabbit-Proof Fence".  After each song, then the antipasta was served. To go with the white wine, we had a smoked swordfish with fig on something like an Indian Pampadum cracker. The pairing was remarkable, the saltiness of the swordfish complimenting the fruity stawberriness in the wine.  Then another musical piece was played after which we were poured a red Barbera with which we ate a crostini with an olive tapenade. Again great wine and a remarkable pairing with the saltiness of the tapenade bringing to light the almost non-existent sweetness in the wine. If you drunk the wine by itself, you would not notice the sweetness at all.  Then it was another musical selection, and out came the second red wine for the evening made from a Croatini grape. With this we ate amarone salami, pecorino parmesean and an orange marmelade. There was one final musical selection and the evening was done, but not until after the 86-yr old man sang, in English, a raunchy and bawdy tale about Mr. Murphy's daughter. Rick and I were the only ones that appeared to understand the lyrics. We met the gentleman later and learned that he was born in Germany but, being a Jew, he fled in the 1930's to Canada and then proceeded to live in a variety of countries, including 20 years in the US (Cambridge, MA) and Mexico, before returning to Germany.


After the performance, Massimo sat with us, continually refilling our glasses with the Croatini wine, and discussed his life and wine for sometime. He was born in Sicily and moved to Berlin 20-yrs agao. He has a knack for finding the small vineyards in Italy where he can acquire good wine inexpensively, due the lack of name recognition and a distribution on the part of the vineyard, and is able to pass the savings on to the customers.  A quick word about wine in Europe. Good European wine is unbelievably inexpensive. Not surprisingly Australian and American wine is much more expensive. The bottles we were sampling this evening, based on the taste, could probably have gone for between $35 and $50 easily. Here in Massimo's establishment we were able to purchase one bottle each of the Barbera and Croatini for about $13 and $27 respectively. How we wanted to buy more! We then bid Massimo Gute Abend and made our way home.