Greetings from sunny Berlin! And this time I really do mean sunny, as spring has arrived here in full force, a delightful payoff to Berliners for their enduring the long, gray winter.
Berliners enjoying the Spring on the banks of the Spree
Spring was something we awaited with much anticipation. The city really comes alive when the weather turns nice. Heck, it didn't even need to turn all that nice - once it edged above 40 degrees we started seeing people outside at sidewalk cafes, where the outdoor seating comes adorned with blankets for those ready to escape their cabin fever. This being a tourist destination, regular Berliners are not the only people who suddenly come out of the woodwork. All over the place we see more and more street entertainers and vendors.
Breakin'
Yes, that is a Trabant parked behind him on the left
This picture captures a particularly odd and amusing sight in Berlin. Around the tourist hotspots you'll see several of these guys hawking old Russian and East German wares. It's now almost 20 years since the Wall fell, so personally I find it hard to believe that they're still working from old, Cold War (mint condition!) stocks of officer hats, combat helmets, and gas masks. Yes, gas masks! What a sweet souvenir that is, pick up one for the kids!
We have taken full advantage of the spring. I started running, through the large Tiergarten park (thankfully, I have not been mugged) and across the touristy Mitte area. I can't help but wonder how many tourists will return home with photos that feature a sweaty Colin passing by the Brandenburg Gate. One of the things I've noticed while running is that there are now times when I'm starting to think in German. I discovered this as I ran along Unter den Linden, a central street with hordes of tourists. As they blindly step out in front of me or block the sidewalk as they wait en masse to enter Madame Tussaud's, I find myself mentally cursing them in German ("Scheisse, Arschloch!"). My German remains mediocre in most domains of life, but apparently it happily feeds my more obnoxious side.
With the arrival of spring we've been enjoying lunches and dinners outside at restaurants, and late afternoons on the balcony. Nobody loves being outside in the spring more than Aidan, so we're taking him to the park most days of the week.
Aidan with his babysitter, Claudia
A mighty swing sends the ball high up in the air
On the balcony
Running in the park
Short video - Aidan on the slide at a local park
Aidan's also enjoying lots of day trips with his school, and trips to birthday parties with friends. This kindergarten has really worked out well for him. There are days when I drop him off and he gives me a huge smile as he runs off with some friend. The other kids love him; I can't count the number of times we've arrived at the same time as some other child and they've happily shouted, "Aidan!" Their parents will exclaim in an equally happy tone, "Ah, so THAT is Aidan!" He's apparently made quite an impression here, and I think they will be sad to see him go.
Face-painted as a leopard for a visit with a French-African storyteller
Kant
Kindergarten, where it is categorically imperative that kids learn the golden
rule
(nerdy philosophy joke)
One of the highlights of this early part of April is a visit from Jen's mom (still in progress as I write this). She picked a perfect time to visit, arriving as she did (despite the best efforts of Continental Airlines) to such a beautiful spring week. So far she's only on day three of her trip, but in that brief time she's eaten twice at sidewalk restaurants, enjoyed a boat ride on the Spree, visited various churches, seen decorated Easter eggs at Potsdamer Platz, and enjoyed lots of quality time with Aidan.
Boat trip on the Spree
One minute video of Grandma giving a few gifts to Aidan
So, spring in the city is everything I'd hoped for and more. It just feels great, though it also rubs in the dwindling amount of time we have left here - we return to Indiana one month from today...
Running has eaten a little into my museum time, but not so much that I'm not still getting my culture fix. Below, various notes on things around Berlin that I've been gathering during our time here.
The Sun Always Shines on TV (tower)
The most iconic building on the Berlin landscape is the Fernsehturm, or TV tower. Built in East Berlin while the city was divided, it looms large, visible from much of the city, and it serves as a nice big target for me when I'm running. When the sun shines on it, the reflection comes in the shape of a cross; in atheist East Germany, Berliners labeled this the "Pope's Revenge". The urban mythology is that the Swedish engineers who designed it did this intentionally; probably not true, but it makes for a good story.
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It's hard for my camera to capture the sun-cross, as it doesn't handle bright light well, but here's one attempt at it |
The TV tower cross illustrated on a Berlin-themed Easter egg at Potsdamer Arkaden |
You Say You Want a Revolution...
There's a fair amount of protest sentiment in Europe these days. Europe has
for a long time had a pretty active anti-war contingent, and the anti-US, anti-capitalist
folks have been emboldened by the recent mammoth failures of American-style
finance and deregulation. Our home town of West Lafayette is not exactly a place
where one sees much protest spirit, so it's interesting for me to see it here
in Berlin. A few examples:
This is a protest against Chancellor Angela Merkel's government by environmentalists. The caption reads, "Not just banks, also save the climate!". Note the styling of the poster and the appropriation of Obama's "yes, we can" slogan in their URL. As recent newspaper articles have noted, Barack Obama is right now the most popular politician in the world (admittedly, "most popular politician" will always be a ranking graded on a very steep curve). Over the last month I have twice had German strangers talk with me in glowing terms about Obama. So, it's no surprise to see his imagery and rhetoric adapted in this way. Too bad they can't pronounce his name correctly - the Germans tend to say it like "barrack", but then Americans butcher Merkel's name too, so it's all even.
Some things really highlight for me the differences between Germany and the United States. As noted above, East Germany was a nominally atheist nation, and Western Europe has also seen levels of religious faith decline over time. So perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised at the above. The Potsdamer Arkaden (a big, American-style shopping mall filled with generic, global brand stores) currently features a collection of painted Easter eggs. Some feature relatively benign depictions of Berlin (like the one with the TV tower), but some also are more political in nature, like this one, showing police behind riot shields spraying water cannons on rock-throwing protestors. Again, these are supposed to be Easter eggs, but other than the cross on the TV tower (which is hardly a focal point), there was no other religious imagery at all. In the US people would be up in arms about such appropriation of Christian imagery - Fox News would be going crazy and Glenn Beck would be crying, Sean Hannity would be blaming Obama and Bill O'Reilly would be ambushing some poor schlub he deemed responsible; but, in Berlin, nobody really seems to care.
I particularly like this piece of graffiti - "The only people who know cool I am are the secret police!"
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things
Recently I was intrigued to notice a museum here in Berlin called "Museum der Dinge" - literally, "Museum of Things". The name was intriguing, so I decided to check it out, and was rewarded with one of my favorite museums that I've seen here. I guess if we had such a museum in English it'd be called the "Museum of Stuff", because that's what it is - a collection of stuff that would have occupied the homes of Germans over the last century. Floor-to-ceiling cabinets house everything from cigarette boxes to razors, record player to iPods, covering the development of everyday things over the course of a century. A decade ago I'd have had no appreciation for the design aspects of these items, some intentionally "designy", most not. However, I spent a few years working in a consultancy where I was surrounded by industrial designers, and talking with them helped me better appreciate the design of everyday stuff. There were a few jarring things in there; there was, after all, a period where "everyday things" included things with Nazi imagery on them, so a couch cushion embroidered with Hitler's face caught me a little off guard. Still, the exhibit was really very neat.
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Above: boxes of tobacco and cigarettes |
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Above: the most awesome TV/stereo ever |
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History, Ever-Present
Last week I took advantage of one spring day to check out a few places I hadn't yet seen. The first was Platz der Luftbruecke, a plaza to honor the Berlin Airlift. It's in front of the now-closed Tempelhof Airport, where the planes for the Airlift landed with their supplies for isolated West Berliners. On the plaza they have a memorial to those who died as part of this effort. The word "Luftbruecke" literally means "air bridge", and so the memorial is supposed to reach like a bridge into the sky. My photographic efforts cannot do it justice, but here's my best shot:
About a mile from there is a particularly odd piece of Nazi legacy:
It's called a Schwerbelastungskörper, which Wikipedia roughly translates as "heavy loading body." Back in the early 1940s, Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer, developed a vision of a rebuilt Berlin, called Welthaupstadt Germania, the centerpiece of which would be the Volkshalle, a mammoth building capped with a 950 foot tall dome, capable of holding in excess of 150,000 people. A problem with this plan, though, was that Berlin is built on somewhat swampy land, and the Volkshalle would be very heavy. So, they decided to test how much weight-per-square-foot it could support by building this big thing. It weighs over 12,000 tons, and the idea was to see if it would sink, and if so, how much. If it sank less than three inches, then they could build the Volkshalle. However, it sank seven inches. That and World War II pretty much took care of these grand plans for Berlin. It's not terribly attractive and not really the kind of tourist attraction that makes a city swell with pride, but you can't just destroy 12,000 tons so densely packed without a lot of explosives, enough that you'd also do damage to the surrounding apartment buildings. So, it appears to be a permanent feature of the Berlin landscape.
Random Stuff
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Two favorite sculptures. The one on the left looks to me like a critique of climbing the corporate ladder; however, it's right next to a big investment bank so maybe they think it means something different. The second I like to think of as sounding a barbaric "Yawp!"
A scene from Wim Wenders' movie "Himmel ueber Berlin," featuring Peter Falk, was filmed at a bratwurst stand near our apartment. They have a little display up to celebrate this. (The movie was released as "Wings of Desire" for English-speaking audiences, and subsequently remade as the English-language "City of Angels".)
The play "The Producers" is coming to Berlin this year. Many productions outside Germany feature the Nazis with swastikas on their uniforms. This is not so welcome here, so instead they're using this emblem, a Nazi-fied pretzel!
Thinking about graduate school? Consider this fine institution, the Berlin Beer Academy!
And finally, as a reward for those of you who made it all the way to the end of this entry, a quote from Jen that I forgot when I posted about the Scotland trip. This quote comes from the department of things Jen never thought she would say: "Man, this haggis is yum!"
Until next time...
