31 August: Berlin Day 1

Early Start

For the first night after flying 9 hours east, we slept pretty well, not up until 6am. By 7 we were on the street. Took the U-Bahn (subway) to Potsdamer Platz and started walking. The weather forecast had been discouraging, mostly cloudy with 20% chance of rain. But to our delight the sky was mostly clear and only had scattered clouds all day.

First thing we noticed was the wacky roof of the Sony Center in the early light.

By the way, there are more pictures in the Smugmug gallery than we include here.

Famous Gate

Wanting to approach the Brandenburg Gate from the West so as to have the light behind it, David navigated us across a piece of the Tiergarten, the big green space in the middle of the city. Which by the way is thickly forested, not at all the open park we'd just assumed it would be.

Anyway, David mis-navigated and sent us at a slant that cost an extra kilometer of walking. But coming back toward the Gate we caught an early commuter defying traffic with the gate beyond.

Shortly after, a surly tourist dodging more commuters.

Then we went and took the standard pics.

The tour coaches had only just started arriving.

Not everybody gets it with the moon behind.

Reichstag

Next up, the Reichstag or Parliament building. It is topped by a glass dome that is said to be worth seeing.

There was a queue to get in even at 9:30.

There was also a thorough and rather intrusive security check, stiff as any airport check-in. However, the hour wait and annoyance was justified, the dome is spectacular to look at and to look out of.

To repeat: there are several more pictures of the Reichstag dome and other things in the Smugmug gallery. We're not putting everything here because it just gets too long to read and too tedious to edit.

Catholic Cathedral

We walked some ways down Unter Den Linden, meh, a wide shopping street with restaurants, and had an early lunch. Stopped at the Catholic cathedral in Bebelplatz, which appears to have been patterned on the Pantheon in Rome.

Bebelplatz is famous as the site of a 1933 book-burning by the Brown Shirts and Hitler Youth. That event is commemorated by an art work, "the empty library" which is impossible to photograph: a window set in the cobbles of that plaza below which is a small room lined with empty, white bookshelves (see the wikipedia link for an image).

Our Neighborhood

Back home for a rest, then in the evening light we went out to check out a park in our neighborhood of Pariserstrasse. It's a very pleasant area, streets lined with four-story apartment blocks, lots of trees. Two blocks down is LudwigKirchePlatz.

On this tiny square there is a play area that was heavily used, mothers and some dads with little kids, hanging out and talking and playing. Two sides of the area are lined with restaurants with sidewalk tables. Around back of the church is a garden for people who want quiet.

We sat here and read for a while before eating supper at a nearby place.

Getting to Berlin

Most of Northern Europe was covered by cloud but there were a few breaks. This is the outskirts of Frankfurt. We said, ooh, wind generators, but turns out, they're everywhere.

Germany is (a) green in color and (b) big on wind power.

The plane got in early, there was no hassle whatever at passport control, and we had plenty of time to admire the trains.

Inside, the trains are super clean and ride like silk, and we settled down for the ride, first 3 hours to Leipzig, then an hour to Berlin.

Here's a typical view from the train.

And here's what the train driver sees, looking out the aerodynamic snoot.

The leg from Frankfurt to Leipzig, the train made a lot of stops and never really got rolling over 100mph. It gradually fell a few minutes behind schedule. As there was only 6 minutes between our scheduled arrival in Leipzig and the Berlin train departing, we started getting nervous. And in fact, when we got off the train, there was no Berlin train waiting on the next platform.

We spent some time working out from the schedules that the next one wouldn't be for an hour, and would our reserved seat assignments be good on a different train, oh wurra wurra, when a train pulled up to the platform and—it was train #1208, the one that we were scheduled to take! It also was running late, so that all worked out.

The run from Leipzig to Berlin was more of the same scenery, but the train boomed along at a genuine high speed, something significantly over 100mph.

On the way out of the Berlin HauptBahnHof (central train station, hereinafter to be referred to as the Hbf) we stopped at the tourist office and bought "welcome cards" that give us 5 days of free rides on public transport and museum discounts. Then a taxi to our hotel, which we'll describe later, and its neighborhood.

Out for dinner and back and check email and then, here's Marian just 24 hours and 5 minutes after getting into the airport limo in Palo Alto:

She suggested I take this, by the way.

"...and came down."

(Obscure SF reference: "...and came down" is the opening sentence of a famous science fiction story.) We came down at Frankfurt ahead of schedule. We followed signs to the railway station along a meandering route up and down and around, and reached the platform with two hours to spare! So we checked with the Deutsche-Bahn office to see if we could leave sooner than 12:11, but oops, sorry, you got your tickets at a special low rate. To take an earlier train will cost an additional €250. Ach du lieber. So we are sitting on the platform using up a T-mobile 60-minute hotspot purchase...

and admiring the smoothness with which the high-speed trains come and go.

Drumming fingers impatiently...

Friday, each time one of passed the dining table, we dropped on it something to take on the trip, and by afternoon, everything was there. So this morning we packed.

Interestingly, about 23 hours and 40 minutes before scheduled departure, we got an email from United urging us to check in online. We had supposed that online check-in was never done for international flights, but it is. Had only to enter passport numbers and a few other items, and then print the boarding passes, visible in the pic.

So... a quiet day of waiting to go. Got to stay up late tonight, to start getting onto Euro time.

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Tomorrow: packing.