havecarryonwilltravel

We walk from our hotel this morning towards Potsdamer Platz. It is cold outside, chilly enough that I wish I had gloves on.

As we walk and gaze up at the surrounding buildings, I realize that most of the buildings are massive. Massive and heavy looking. Massive and imposing. Can a building be massive and airy?

I think that maybe it is just those buildings around Potsdamer Platz and we will see some light airy structures further in our walk, but we don’t. The Reichstag (German Parliament) is even more imposing, but I guess if one building should be that way, it should be the main government building, to show strength and toughness and grit and a “Don’t mess with us” attitude.

Reichstag, Berlin

Further along, we pass by the Opera. Tall, set up high, still imposing, but coral coloured. At least it is trying to be light and airy!

The Opera

The Berlin Dom is our next stop. Again…..huge. It warrants an inside view of the dome as I do not think I have seen a dome this large before, so we pay the 7 Euro and head in.

Berlin Cathedral

As I sit in a pew and gaze up and around. Gold glints off the ceiling, frescoes abound, the stained glass is brilliant. But I feel very tiny sitting there. God and the church are these huge things, and the populace are these itty bitty tiny things? mmmmmm.

Berlin Cathedral

After a quick lunch of Bratwurst on a bun, we go for a walk down Karl Marx Strasse. It is an eight lane roadway, bordered on both sides by trees and tall buildings. The sense of scale, again, is massive. What I feel is missing is the volume of traffic, both vehicular and human, that the roadway can accommodate.  It feels very empty for the grandiosness. I think of the Champs Elysees in Paris and it is grand, and full of traffic and shops and people. This is not.

Building on Karl Marx Strasse

I think this is the one impression I will be taking back with me about Berlin, imposing architecture that wasn’t totally comfortable for me.

It’s 4:15 pm and raining in Berlin. I bail on Murray and come back to the hotel, while he walks in the rain to see the Bauhaus Archive building and a couple of other buildings. Too wet for me.

The day starts cool but dry, a good walking temp. We walk over the canal by our hotel and then to Checkpoint Charlie. If you need to locate tourists, go there. We don’t stay long, just long enough to look at a few info boards with photos from the days of the wall, snap a few pics and we are out of there.

Checkpoint Charlie

I find it rather ironic that the sign in the back of the photo of Checkpoint Charlie is, of course, McDonalds.

There are two places to view sections of the wall. We stroll by the first one where there is a display and a museum which talk about the wall.

Our next stop is the AEG building that Peter Behrens, Gropius’ mentor before the Bauhaus started, designed. It was initially a factory and it is imposing, massive and amazing. Two, or more, story high windows. I feel very small and insignificant standing next to it.

We walk past the other section of THE wall and this one has displays about all the people who were shot trying to cross the wall. This part of the wall was built through a cememtary, requiring many graves to be relocated. It is a somber sight.

The western Wall through the eastern Wall across no man’s land

Our art fix for the day is visiting the Berggruen Museum, which houses modern artworks by Picasso, Klee, Matisse and Giacometti. I love the tall thin figures of Giacometti’s sculptures and the colours used by Klee.

It is way past lunch so we stop in at Charlotte restaurant where Murray has Curryworst and fries and I have Weiner Schnitzel and fries. Curryworst is a large sausage with BBQ sauce poured over top and curry powder sprinkled on. The food is just what we needed.

Oh, a knock on the door…Murray is back already! I will pass the post to Murray now to finish off.

Bauhaus Archive

Few more Germany/Berlin thoughts. There are no speed limits on the autobahn. It is amazing how the cars fly along the highway. There is a big difference between Alberta and Germany that makes this possible. The roads are in fantastic shape. There are virtually no potholes even on the city streets, no bumpity bumps, no ridges caused by freeze thaw or temperature changes, nothing, the roads are smooth. Our road crews  should come take lessons from the Germans.

We thought we might have trouble using a credit card in rural Denmark so we brought a bit of extra cash with us. Traveled though the entire country and had so much cash left we lived most of our Copenhagen stint with Krone. Then we get to Germany, figure we should have no trouble using a credit card here. But, even in Berlin, the world class metropolis, most of the food establishments we have eaten in  take cash only, no cards, go figure.

Germany shuts down on Sunday. But we are in Berlin, city of the world, yes. No, this place is shut tighter than a drum. Half the restaurants are open, the museums and galleries are open but grocery stores, nope, malls, nope, corner stores, nope. Sunday is a day of rest here.

After saying we were having trouble finding people that speak English in Germany we hit Berlin. Folks from all over the world live here, people need to communicate with each other and English is the chosen language. Here it is unusual to meet someone that does not speak English.

Monday is gallery closing day so tomorrow is a day of sights.

Debbie in the midst of a cold and not moving too fast so we plan a day on the metro. There are some things too far to walk to, like most of this city, so we work out a route and jump on the train.

A flea market is stop one. I don’t know if there is an equivalent at home but this is like a giant daily garage sale. In what was I think a parking area near the edge of the Tier Garten there are 4 or 5 very long rows of tent like structures. People rent these tents, I presume on a daily basis, and sell stuff. That is the best word I can come up with, stuff. You name it, it is there. Antiques of all description, clothing, some but not many handy crafts, CD’s and records, jewellery, stamps and coins, any kind of small stuff you can imagine, we even note a couple of folks selling old dental picks and mirrors. Weird thing is each of the stalls seems to have a theme. Like the CD guy is not selling any dishes, and the dishes person is not selling any clothing. And all the merchandise is ‘previously owned’. We wondered how the seller managed to amass great numbers of similar objects so they can then be sold. As I presume this type of venue precludes the need for garage sales they could get the stuff from estate sales or maybe folks downsizing or?????? As we progress through our day we discover this is not a one off thing, there is another flea market set up the same way in a section of town far to the south of the one we first go to.

The Berlin metro is amazing. We get off one train and our transfer train is there waiting. Must of known we were coming. The longest we have had to wait is for a bus. We did not know the bus times so we just went there and waited maybe 10 minutes. We zip around the city like we know what we are doing. We need two maps – one of the city streets and the other of the metro/underground train system. We freelance the buses and so far have done OK. We each take a map and sit every once in a while to coordinate.

Nachste halt, Pucklerstrasse. The street names sure are big in German, the locals don’t seem to have any trouble with this but it is hard for us, we go with the first 4 to 6 letters and get off at that stop, so far it has worked.

A couple of hundred meters from this bus stop are a two art galleries – the Brucke Museum and the Kunsthaus Dahlem. The Brucke was a group of artists active in the 1910’s in and around Berlin. I don’t ever recall hearing of them in any of my art courses but I found the stuff they did really cool. They worked in a time slightly after the Impressionist and more in the same time as the Expressionist painters in France and southern Germany. I don’t know how much, if any, contact they had with those groups but the work shows striking similarities. Not the same, just similar. It must have been something in the air at the time. Anyway neat stuff.

The second gallery building started life as an atelier commissioned by the Third Reich. It did go through several other changes but finally in the summer of 2015 it was opened to display post war German sculptures. I am not a big fan of sculptures, not that I dislike them but they don’t stir much in me, but I did like this display. Well worth the price of admission.

It’s Saturday night in the big city and two different symphonies are playing. Thought we should take in some music. We chose by building rather than program. The Konzerthaus Berlin was finished in 1821. It is a finely detailed hall, very different from the Bauhaus architecture we have been following that shuns any ornamentation at all. Even thought it was not a full time concert hall until 1994, it was fun to sit in a hall where concerts have been played on and off for a couple of hundred years. The sight lines did leave quite a bit to be desired. We sat high on the side of the hall and could only see about 1/3 of the orchestra.

The city is vast and it may be another tram day tomorrow. We’ll see.

Everywhere we go both Denmark and Germany, except Dessau???, we see kids on field trips. Learning out of the school. Seeing what the world has to offer. And from what I can make they are not just one or two hour trips. The older kids are on buses checking into hostels and wandering the streets of the town in the evenings.

The play parks are, if you can believe it, dangerous. They have climbing apparatus 3M plus high with sand as a landing platform. You know sand that stuff cats actually might shit in, maybe. They have spinney things, not quite like our old merry-go-rounds but something you might get sick on. And there are no fences around the day cares. Oh I feel for the wimpy kids of North America.

English is not very prevalent in Germany. In Denmark it was unusual to run into someone who did not speak English, young, old it did not matter. Travel was exceedingly simple for us. We did learn a bit of Danish and tried to use it but anything complicated required we use English or charades. Here in Germany it is hard to find anyone that speaks English. Not even the folks involved with tourists are very good at it. Young, old again it does not matter. The kids are able to help out but still have to search for words and our conversations are stilted. It is not that people should have to speak English to satisfy our needs it is just that I find the contrast interesting.

I find Germans a little bit cold. Not all, it is just I found a few folks out and out refused to stop and help a lost tourist out. They walked by me as if I did not exist, not even acknowledging I had asked a question. From my Canadian perspective I found this extremely rude.

There are not a lot of panhandlers (beggars) here but there are a few. Two or three in Munich, a big city, and at least one in the smaller cities we have stopped at. The kneel at the edge of the sidewalk and not say anything, just hold out a hat. In contrast I did not observe even one person asking for money in Denmark.

Dessau at least the areas around the center of the city is not very well kept. The lawns for the most part are dead. Not one green blade of grass anywhere. The foliage is also very thin, there is as much dirt as dead grass. The weeds in the so called lawns however thrive and provide evidence that people do not cut the grass as those said weeds are a foot high. (the dead, yellow grass could be a result of this summer’s heat wave but we did not see that elsewhere)

Bathrooms in Denmark are an all in one affair. The toilet, sink and shower are in one small space. The drain is in the center of the room and curb to contain water is at the doorway. I remember this because I tripped over those curbs just about every time I entered the WC. In Germany every place we have stayed the can is on the North American model. The shower is contained with the drain inside the shower stall and the curb defines the shower stall. Odd.

As we traveled on the train from Munich to the north part of Germany we noted how with each village, town or city we passed the urban landscape is noticeably more industrial. The places are not as urbane, more of a country feel to the them. They, except where bombed to hell in WWII, look older. I’m not sure if they are not a well maintained of if they have replaced fewer of the ancient structures.

As we fly across the country side in a train we note little raised towers here and there. Not is any particular place or in any sort of order. When we were in Munich I noted one outside of R & I’s place. R told me the hunters used them in the fall. The climb up in the 1M x 1M blind and sit and wait for game to pass by. All Debbie and I can figure is the beer is too heavy to carry about wandering here and there like the hunters in Alberta so they pack in some beer and wait for the deer to cross close enough to have a shot at it.

Berlin

We are now in a BIG city. No edge of town in sight. We rode the train from Dessau today and Debbie was astute enough to notice the train ticket, which we purchased to included the tram within Berlin to our hotel, was an all day ticket for 2. So we had a look at a couple of the far flung things we had to do and did those on a more or less free ride.

Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate)

First stop is to see a neighbourhood designed by a guy named Bruno Taut. The center piece of the area is the ‘hufeisensiedlung’, the horseshoe estate. It is truly a great piece of urban design. There is a horseshoe shape building of flats with a green space the size of maybe 5 football fields in the middle. I think I could live there no problem.

I then headed to one of the main Berlin squares and walked back to the hotel. The small part of the city I saw is an interesting mix of new and old. Some with absolute no redeeming features what so ever and other places I had to stop in my tracks and admire.

Konzerthaus Berlin

Berlin is truly an international city. Sitting on the train, looking around there are people from every continent on earth in one tram car.

Looks like this place is going to take all of the energy we have left to explore it in the three days we have.