Postings from Germany

Date Weekend

The earlier promised Date Day was magically transformed into Date Weekend in honor of my birthday and in honor of the fact that we really wanted to go to Berlin and this was perhaps the only weekend between now and January to do it!  OK, I can do that.

Deutsche Bahn (the railway) makes it easy.  From Bremen to Berlin is a bit over three hours by train; by car it is at least that PLUS you have to drive through Hamburg which is as much fun as having teeth pulled. Or you can drive through Hannover, almost as much fun.  Either way, you have to deal with multiple construction "events" along the way which cause major bouts of frustation and costs you happy.  Never give up happy for a road trip.

The main plan was meeting up with friends but that left plenty of time to see the sights. Berlin has a lot to offer and you can't even begin to do it in a weekend. 

Thursday we arrived mid-day and found ourselves on the security camera at the subway station before we found our (unbelievably ordinary but clean and modern, NO WINDOW BOXES!) hotel and headed to the Neues Museum (New Museum) only to find we had to have a ticket for a time slot in order to get in at all.  Plan B: get tickets for Friday and then head to the Alte Museum  (Old Museum). 

New and Old are relative terms.  The Neues Museum is New because the Old Museum was too small for all the artifacts collected by King Frederich II.  The Old Museum has mostly ancient Etruscan, Roman and Greek artifacts and I was happy to make acquaintence with some old friends, among them Pericles who oversaw the construction of the Parthenon, and lots of old vases and statues from the age of the Parthenon.

Friday we breakfasted like kings at the hotel and then headed to the current exhibit at the Neue National Galerie.  All these names are confusing, I know.  I am terminally confused by some of them:  museums, galleries, old, new.  But this building, designed by Mies van der Rohe (who spent a lot of his professional life in Chicago, like another person I like) is very special. They have no permanent exhibit but rather put on temporary shows; currently it is Bilder Träume, or Picture Dreams - surrealism in Europe and its connections in New York.  VERRRRYY nice.

Then back to the Neues Museum and the old Egyptian stuff.  Bless Werner, he didn't complain though this old stuff is really not his thing.  There were mummies and sarcophogi and (more) vases and even more Roman statues.  The building itself is interesting:  it was heavily damaged in WWII, left open to the elements until 1980 when the East German government decided to try and save it and then when they just got started on the hard restoration work, The Wall came down and it became the project of the new unified German state.  It's been almost 20 years in the making.

Nefretiti is the S T A R attraction of this museum and people are streaming in from all over Germany and Europe and Scandinavia to see her in her new setting.  Here are two images: one with her husband, Akhanaton and the other famous image of her.  She is beautiful.  Funny, she could always be seen in her temporary housing before but the renovation of this last shell of a building on the Museum Island in the center of Berlin is something that makes everyone here proud and is an incredible magnet. 

Otherwise we spent time looking at maps and figuring out where we were headed.  We weren't the only ones.  We must have seen 5,000 people looking at maps during these few days.  At least.  I am not kidding.

Of course went to the Brandenburg Gate and passed by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  At first it seems just there, but it is a moving and impressive memorial.  It's next to the American Embassy, and right next to the Brandenburg Gate.

We walked and rode the bus, but you can rent bikes or Segways to get around.  Don't know that I want to try that on a first visit to a big city. 

The Alexander Platz is probably the most famous square in the former East Berlin, the source of espionage and intrigue; from our hotel window we could see the communication tower and it is visible from most everywhere.  This is a collage of the Tower, including it as a head ornament over my white head. Cute!

And then it was time for Halloween at Nicole and Jeremy's.  We were prepared!  I'd downloaded scary images from the internet and Werner had made them into masks for us.  Everyone was suitably horrified.

After a  dinner of dirty rice and red beans (delicious!), we watched a slide show of Nicole and Jeremy's US trip through Colorado and the Southwest, and finally took a group picture.  It was (what else!?) a really nice weekend.