The last 48 hours have flown by a lot faster than I thought they would! Yesterday, my supposed “off day” because of the rain ended up quite a bit useful. The thunderstorm slated for the day moved through over night, so the day ended up pretty nice. After sleeping in late (15 minutes from the close of breakfast) I got up and did a little work on photos before heading out for an early lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe just down the street. I was the first customer of the day, as they let me come in about 15 minutes before they officially started lunch.

After that I was tired again for some reason, so I got another hour nap in before talking to Karen and my parents on Skype. After that I dabbled with my photos again for a little bit in Photoshop but then decided it was too nice to stay in any longer so I thought I would go to the Pergamonmuseum. As luck would have it, a minute after I got on the bus it started to rain pretty heavily. Just for fun I took the bus to the end of the line to see what that side of Berlin was like. It goes along the south and is more of a blue-collar, lower middle class area. There were a few signs of Turkish populations (via their businesses) on the streets the bus went around.

From the end of the line I had to figure out how to get back to the middle of town to Museum Island, so I caught a subway that went to Alexanderplatz. When I left the subway it was sunny and nice again, so I took the opportunity to take some pictures with the sun while I had the chance. Then I made it down to Am Kupfergraben and crossed the Spree to the Pergamonmuseum where I paid 12 Euros to enter. It was worth it, as they currently have a special exhibit combining their collection on ancient Babylon with collections from the Louvre and the British Museum (the Royal British Museum? I’m not sure which British museum…) The entire collection was stunning, and I was there for over two hours. When I left it was almost completely dark, so I just found my way back to the hotel in what had become a very active night scene in a drizzly Berlin.

Today Dr. Rogers and I met up at his hotel near Gesundbrunnen, a shopping mall and major train crossing station. After walking around in Prenzlauer Berg and some of the northern districts, we paid about 7 Euros for a tour of Berlin’s underground – one of three or four tours by a nonprofit company trying to preserve Berlin’s underground historical bunkers, some of which pre-date World War II. We toured both a pre-war bunker and a 1970s Cold War era bunker which is built into and around the Parkstrasse U-Bahnhof. It was well worth the nearly two hours of hunching over in mostly dark, underground bunkers.

After that we thought we would try our hand at traveling south but when we arrived at the Hermannstrasse U-bahnhof we surmised that the area was similar to that of Prenzlauer Berg. We were getting hungry by that point (around 5 p.m.) so we headed back to Alexanderplatz where we planned to go to the TV tower to see the city from above (hopefully on a clear evening). We ate Italian at a nicer outdoor restaurant and sat around talking about Berlin but even then it wasn’t close enough to sun down to go up to the tower. After sitting around people-watching for a while we figured we had time to watch a movie, so we went to see Get Smart (with German voice-overs) at a nearby Kino. When that ended we went up to the tower, an expensive 9.5 Euros which wasn’t even really worth it because the view from the tower had a bad reflection of light on the Plexiglass and wasn’t good for taking photos.

Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy again, so we’ll probably spend a lot of it indoors, starting with the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

See you all later, and sorry I haven’t gotten pictures up yet. I just haven’t had the time and now it’s getting to be a bit overwhelming!

Today Dr. Rogers and I met up at Potsdammer Platz at 9 a.m. to explore western Berlin. I showed him around Potsdammer Platz in a prevailing mist-rain, which we tried to sit out in Sony Center after walking around some. Finally we just left to go to the Ku’damm area, but fortunately the drizzle let up not long after we got there.

I continued to show him around the sites that I’ve already been to, and we went into both the old and new sections of the Gedächtniskirche to see what it was/is like inside. It is one of the few places that I’ve been to that feels really touristy. By that point it was nearing lunch, so Dr. Rogers and I sat down for a drink (and I had a currywurst) at a wurst stand outside the Zoologisher Garten Bahnhof area.

Dr. Rogers asked me if I thought I was getting what I needed out of the trip, and I told him I thought so, but he wasn’t so sold on all of it. Based on his other trips and studies in Europe (and because of my lack of experience in other European cities) he explained that his first impression of Berlin is that it isn’t all that international like a New York, L.A., or Chicago. Sure, it has a large amount of international retail stores and restaurants, a little bit of global culture and some international tourists (not nearly as many as expected this year) but so does nearly every major capital city, including D.C., London, and Paris. He also pointed out that these same capital cities (and other major European cities) also have international business headquarters and plenty of cultural arts just like Berlin.

This is all makes sense, and wasn’t even something I recognized without knowing what other capital cities are like. I did suggest that perhaps tourism is down this summer because of economic reasons, and it is possible that Berlin has become less exciting of a tourist destination than say the exciting early reunification days of the 1990s. It may be, for example, that British tourists who once considered Berlin an exotic tourist destination of the emerging eastern Europe now consider it less edgy and head to Romania (Bucharest was Dr. Rogers’s example) or the Czech Republic instead. That doesn’t make Berlin a has-been, just more in line with the norm. And, even if the down-tourism-year scenario is correct, it still doesn’t make Berlin very different from other major places; again, just closer to normal than it used to be.

My work isn’t all for naught, of course, with this new information. My field work is just revealing that my hypothesis was a bit off but still salvageable. My paper can still show the importance of Berlin in the E.U. and particularly to Germans (as most of the tourists we’ve seen have either been high school age or old retired Germans.) It can also show how successfully they’ve reunited in a short time. Plenty (practically all) of the elements of my research are still useful to my work. This is precisely why I had to do fieldwork here, to gain a real feel for Berlin without the bias of book and article writers.

After our sit we headed out to explore Charlottenburg, which is one of the nicest neighborhoods in Berlin. We both agreed that we would want to live here if we had to choose what district of Berlin in which to live. We walked around the Schloss Charlottenburg – practically empty today as compared to overflowing with tourists last year – and saw the gardens and took some pictures and then decided to take a U-bahn trip to Spandau. Spandau is far west Berlin, though it was originally a city unto itself and is older than Berlin. It still retains its own feel and doesn’t really fit into the rest of Berlin, as it is more traditionally German. It was a nice visit and we had a nice supper at a restaurant next to their large church, but it wasn’t really of much importance to my paper.

Now I am quite tired and have even more photos (100+) to go through. It is supposed to be very rainy (thunderstorm) conditions tomorrow, so I’m going to stay in and sleep and work through photos instead of getting out and about.

Hope everyone is doing well!

It’s just about 10 p.m. here in Berlin, and I’m wiped out! Walking around Berlin with Dr. Rogers has been an all day affair, and much like two days ago, I have over a hundred photos and not enough time to work on them tonight. It may be just as well, because it’s looking like rain this weekend which means I might spend the better part of at least one day inside and just work on photos as the rain comes a-tumblin’ down.

Our day started off by meeting at the Brandenburg Gate at 9 which meant a wake up call from Karen around 7. I didn’t really want to get up; I was quite tired, but getting to breakfast earlier was nice since I beat the young tourist crowd. (They’re still here; still loud. Maybe they’ll leave this weekend?)

Anyway, we started walking down Unter den Linden toward the east, noting construction on many of the side streets as well as photographing the Russian Embassy. We turned right on Friedrichstrasse and headed south for a few blocks to look at the more built-up areas of downtown. Quite accidentally, we found ourselves at the Gendarmenmarkt, which features the Franzosicher Dom, Deutscher Dom, and the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Konzerthaus Berlin.

Inside the Deutscher Dom is a permanent, free exhibit on the development of democracy in Germany, and my National Geographic Travel Guide lured me in because it said the fifth floor was about Germany in the EU (a big part of my paper). Well the first four floors were really quite interesting, as Dr. Rogers and I struggled to read enough German between the two of us to make sense of the exhibit. There was an English audio guide, but it didn’t cover every aspect of the museum, so we tried our collective hardest to read the rest. The fifth floor was a bit disappointing, though; it is so high up in the Dom’s dome that there isn’t room for more than a few signs explaining the beginnings of the EU. (The Dom’s dome means the cathedral’s dome…that’s a German-English play on words, since the German Dom means cathedral and sounds like the English Dome… Does it make a bad punster if I have to explain my jokes?)

Anyway, the exhibit took us around two hours to complete, so when we left we tried to decide where to eat lunch, only to decide that we weren’t that hungry and could make it by just getting a drink from a tourist shop on Unter den Linden. From there we rested our feet for a while in the middle of the street: Unter den Linden has a wide median between the traffic lanes that has benches, wurst and drink stands, and, naturally, linden trees.

We then continued our tour by heading deeper into the former East Berlin. We made it to Museum Island around 2 p.m. about which time it started to sprinkle and our decent weather from the morning (complete with sunshine!) had disappeared. We threw around the idea of going to a museum since I thought they were free after 2 on Thursdays (it turns out they are free after 6) but the lines were pretty long and we didn’t really want to waste too much time at that point. Instead, after photographing several of the museums’ outside, we continued on to the Marx-Engels Platz, the Rotes Rathaus, and then Alexanderplatz.

As you will see in photos later, Alexanderplatz (called Alex by the natives) is the center of shopping and commercial business in east Berlin. It was originally developed by the Communist regime of the DDR as the showpiece quarter of the most successful country behind the Iron Curtain. It has been heavily modified and turned into a capitalist center, though many of the former pre-fab housing/apartment complexes around the quarter still show evidence of their cheap Communist-era construction. A few have been nicely redone with new facades, but many are in bad shape and are doomed (At least one ten story apartment building was completely shut down and vacant.)

After we walked around the old “Red” Berlin we decided to go on a subway adventure (much like my trip to Wedding the other day). We got on the U5 at Alexanderplatz and rode it east out into Berlin’s suburbs. The suburb we visited around Wuhletal was pretty nice, more like the traditional German cities that I’ve seen and stayed in during my travels. There we found an old hospital complex for traumatic injuries that was built in 1890 at what was then completely out of town. Germans traditionally associate good health with nature, and the planning of the Krankenhaus (we assumed based on our observations) was that it was built to expose those who experienced trauma to nature to help with the healing process. There were also buildings for psychological study on children and teenagers, and there were several college aged people about, which led us to think that the campus might have been both hospital and medical school. I need to Google it and find out. I’ll report back more later after I’ve had time to search (but for now I’m tired!)

We rode the S-bahn back into town and found a small, interesting Turkish restaurant in the Turkish part of Kreuzberg for supper. Neither of us know much about Turkish food, and since they didn’t have the Dönner kababs famous to Germany, we went with Hackfleisch kababs which were really good. I intentionally planned our stop in that area because the U-bahn station went both north-south on a line toward Dr. Roger’s hotel and east-west (the closed U1 line) toward mine. I took a bus back as far as it would go, switched to the U2 line which follows the U1 line for part of its track, and then switched back to bus to get back to my hotel before walking the last two blocks. It sounds completely complicated, no doubt, to the American readers, but it’s all proof to show that you don’t even have to own a car to get around in Europe. Those of you who been here before know exactly how amazing Germany’s public transportation is.

It’s after 11 now, and I’m going to get in bed. Dr. Rogers and I are meeting again at 9 in the morning, this time at Potsdammerplatz, to explore the west.

I’ll post more tomorrow, and maybe get around to photos by tomorrow evening or Sunday.

Bis Später!

This morning I woke up a little late, around 8:30 when my phone started vibrating. Apparently it takes Vodafone a couple days to set up your text messaging and voicemail service, so I got not only a buzz for a text message but also then a computerized call about the voice mail. Needless to say, I’m still tired.

I don’t have any plans today for one, because I’m tired and for two, because it is super cloudy and supposed to rain today. I need to finish up with photos anyway and I just woke up from a nap. I was feeling weird (light- and kinda fuzzy- headed) after I got back from breakfast and I showered, so I just went ahead and went back to bed.

Now I’m going to go eat a real lunch somewhere. I suspect part of my feeling weird might be because of my strange eating habits the last few days (lack of blood sugar and protein perhaps?), plus I’m hungry around the lunch hour (ok, well it’s 2 p.m.) anyway.

See you guys later. When I get back, I’ll probably talk to Karen, check e-mail and starting naming/describing my photos from yesterday.

“Well now what do I do?”

After covering most of the places I had planned for both today and tomorrow, I sat down at a cafe this morning to think about what else to do  while I still had some sunshine.

I woke up early with Karen calling me on Skype at 7:30 (12:30 a.m. Central) so we could talk before she went to bed and so I would actually get up that early to use the sun (Weather.com told me it would be sunny) while I had the opportunity. So after a quick breakfast (filled with the young German hordes I talked about yesterday) I left for my adventure.

I first took the bus up Ku’damm to the Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof. Here I picked up an S-bahn train to the Hauptbahnhof – Berlin’s main train station. As I did with my host family and a group from UTM two years ago, I knew that starting at the Hauptbahnhof would provide me the opportunity to walk by the Bundeskanzleramt (Office of the Federal Chancellery) and the Bundestag before heading to Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. Again.

I took photos of those two political buildings and then continued on to search for more political buildings between the Gate and Potsdammer Platz. There are quite a lot of political buildings along Wilhelmstrasse and what is known as the Altes Regierungsviertel (old regulations (?) quarter). This area was the center of political activity during the days of of the Prussian empire through both World Wars until it became part of the DDR and the Soviets moved their political buildings to the middle of East Berlin. Since reunification, several political buildings have moved back to the Wilhelmstrasse area, including several offices of the German Bundeslände (Federal States), the upper chamber of Germany’s parliament in the Bundesrat, the Federal Finance Ministry, the Ministry for Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection, the Minstry for Employment and Social Affairs, and the British Embassy. Needless to say there were lots of photos to be taken.

As I meandered about on Wilhelmstrasse, I also walked around parts of Potsdammer Platz and Leipziger Platz to take photos of several important business/economy buildings. I will elaborate more about these on Flickr. I had intended to cover this area tomorrow, but it seemed to work out fine today.

After leaving Potsdammer Platz/Leipziger Platz, I walked back to Wilhemstrasse and didn’t know quite what to do. I knew that I had a few more hours of sun, so I sat down at a cafe and pulled out the maps and National Geographic Guidebook and decided to keep walking down Wilhelmstrasse. Without intending to, I came to a stretch of the Berlin Wall that has been left intact and what is known as the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror), an outdoor exhibit at the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters that covers the history of the Gestapo/SS/SD acts of Terror in WWII. I didn’t really want to see the exhibit, as it isn’t all that useful for my paper, but behind it there was a temporary exhibit on the significance of Wilhelmstrasse through the last two centuries, so I walked and read through that exhibit instead. The exhibit ended at the back of the Bundesrat next to Martin-Gropius-Bau (an art exhibition hall) that wasn’t all that interesting to me, so after a few photos I headed back to Potsdammer Platz to do more photo work.

I photographed most of the large buildings around Potsdammer Platz – the Deutsche Bahn tower, the Mercedes-Benz tower, the Price Waterhouse Cooper building, Sony Center, and the mall at the Mercedes-Benz quarter – Arkaden. By this point my feet were getting tired, so I decided to check out the mall. They have a lot of high fashion clothing stores and other mall type stores (similar to on Ku’damm) so the only places I checked out were a book store and a Gelato-Eis (ice cream) cafe. I ordered a Tartufo based on its picture on the menu. It had chocolate and coffee flavored gelato, whipped cream, and a chocolate wafer. After the first few bites I noticed a bit of an odd flavor (it had a whang to it, as my mother would say) and I looked at my receipt to see that it was a “Tartufo Eierlikor” – Tartufo Irish Liquor. Oops. I don’t know if it was Irish Liquor flavoring…but I’m going to bet not. Live and learn, oh well.

I was about to leave Potsdammer Platz by the same route I took yesterday when I saw signs for the observation deck of the Mercedes-Benz tower. I had planned to go to that before I left but I didn’t know where it was until I saw it as I left the mall. For a student price of 2.5 Euros I took the fastest elevator in Europe to the top (Mom and Rachel will be so proud me. And terrified.) It takes you up 24 floors (90.15 meters) in 20 seconds, about 8.5 meters per second. That’s not all that fast, when you think about it: 8.5 meters per second equals 30.6 km/hour. It’s just straight up in the air instead of in a car along the road.

Anyway, enough of the scientific conversions lecture. (If this were Monty Python, someone would be yelling “Get on with it!”) The view from the top was the best I’ve had of Berlin yet. I’ve been to the top of the Bundestag twice and the Siegelsäule statue once and they’ve got nothing on this. Of course…I haven’t been to the Fernsehturm yet, either. It’s the highest point in Berlin, so more exciting “aerial” photos may be coming to a Flickr near you soon.

Once I was back firmly on the ground I headed back to the hotel where I talked to a waking Karebear and Anita. After a two hour nap, I woke up and went to the grocery store. When I got back I ate some of my bread with Nutella for supper (I wasn’t hungry, again…odd) and then talked to Karen, Anita, Granny, Pop, and Mr. Carroll (sp?) before starting to blog.

Now that I’m almost done, I’m realizing that I probably won’t have time to get my photos up on Flickr before my internet runs out at 10:15 p.m. I’ve planned it so that I don’t have to pay for it at all today – my purchase last night runs until 10:15 tonight and then I’ll buy again in the morning, so that will be one last day (nighttime tonight + daytime of my last day here when I fly out) that I don’t have to pay for internet. Someone remind me to kiss my wireless router with free UTM internet when I get back to Martin…

Anyway, I leave you with a few observations and things I’ve been thinking about in my walks around town.

Tchüss!

——-
1) One thing that Americans may never get used to in any moderate to large size German city is the smells. And most of them are offensive smells. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good smelling things to be found around here, but for every fresh bakery or cafe there are at least two or three smelly manholes emitting sewage smells. Add to the mix plenty of Germans who fit the lack of hygiene stereotype, crowded buses and subway cars, and men and women wearing enough perfume and cologne to cover up their own scent and you’ll have a gagging mess on your hands.

2) Fortunately, Berlin is unlike most large cities in the world that are completely jam-packed with high rise buildings, industrial sites and disgusting air. Unlike London, L.A., Beijing, and more, Berlin has so much green space that cleans the air – so there are places to escape from the smells mentioned above.

3) There are thousands of German words that I don’t know. Even if I pick up on dozens of words every time I come here, at one trip per year (thus far) I’ll master the German language about the time I die. Something should be done to fix this.