Where was I?

On my way to the grocery store today, I saw my breath, for the first time since I've been here. This made me reflect on the passage of time and, then, on how I haven't written anything in my blog for a while.

So, Berlin. In general we felt like we were in Chicago for most of the time that we were in Berlin. Of course the comparison is not complete; Berlin didn't invent the skyscraper, and Chicago wasn't Hitler's vision of the capital of a new continent. But at least superficially, it works for us. There's a similar mix of modern and old buildings, similar scale of both city and the buildings therein, and similar commercial history. And they're both flat cities with parks and well-preserved sight lines to interesting buildings.

The photo I chose for today is of the Berliner Dom, a cathedral on the eastern side of the city. It was built around the turn of the century and then almost immediately hit by bombs in WWII, and it took until 1993 -- after German reunification -- to finish restoration.

Behind the church on the left is the TV tower built in the late 60s by the (communist) GDR. The pink splotches are remnants of the World Cup (held throughout Germany this summer); the sphere was decorated to look like a pink soccer ball.

This was our last day in Berlin. We rented bikes and went around the city and through Tiergarten. "Tier" means "animal," and it is right next to the zoo, but Tiergarten itself is a huge wooded park in the center of the city. It felt more like a state park in the US than like a city park, except that you'd occasionally cross a bridge that had some cool sculptures at each end, or some monument in a clearing.

The day after we left was the anniversary of reunification. We saw the city well on its way getting ready for the holiday, closing off streets and setting up for festivals.

last Saturday

Our friends from Chicago had a wedding to go to in France, and they wanted to see one other (new-to-them) European city while they were on the continent. I told them I'd try to meet them wherever, and when they finally decided on Berlin, Casey was so excited that he blew off his thesis for a weekend and came along. Myself, I was excited to get to use the German I'd learned in high school and college, and curious to see how much of it I'd retained, and of course the history is unique.

The train ride (my first international one) was easy. Only 6.5 hours, and we didn't even have to change trains. Casey implied I was paranoid when I packed little bags of pistachios and arare, but I was vindicated when they announced that the bistro car was out of order. We got reading done on the train -- a borrowed Berlin guidebook, some German romantic literature, and some historical fiction involving Leibniz and Queen Sophie-Charlotte of Brandenburg (all very topical).

Taking the train in, we went through Spandau, where Nazis were imprisoned after the war. The train then went through the western part of Berlin, which is mostly modern and sort of Chicago-looking. Then, in the middle of a large business center, there's a bombed-out church (kept as a reminder of horrors of war). I heard someone gasp when the church came into view. Then the train rode through Tiergarten, and we could look out at the zoo and at kids playing in the park.

Our first destination in Berlin? A bomb shelter. Actually, first Casey got some currywurst, but then we went to a museum called "The Story of Berlin," which was in the same building as a 1970s bomb shelter. The photo for today was taken inside the shelter; it's a row of bunks. The shelter is interesting -- the main purpose is to keep people (~3500 of them) alive for two weeks. Most of the space is taken up by bunks. Oxygen is kept at a low level, so that people will be tired and sleep a lot. Each person is alotted ~2 liters of water per day (from a well 30 m deep). There are no showers. And all the food is a canned breadlike substance, which is high in calories and requires minimal preparation.

The museum itself was also interesting. It started with the first mention of Berlin in some commerce record in the 1200s. I was most interested to see what a German museum would say about the events leading up to World War II, and they were ultimately presented without any excuses. The Allies were never mentioned with negative epithets, and by the same token the economic downturn in the 30s was mentioned but not dwelt on. I don't think they even mentioned the effect of the Treaty of Versailles on German morale, which is often cited in history classes in the US as at least part of the reason that Germans began to feel isolated from the rest of the world.