Been home a few days now, but there's been football and unpacking and homework and this fucking cold. I never really posted much after the first couple days in Berlin, so I'll give a précis for the rest of it. The weather was variably terrible and bad, with a brief foray into pleasant followed by an immediate return of terrible.
Ben and I met his parents at the airport, where they paid 5,80 € for a 0.5 L bottle of Evian. Each. (I told them it was 5.80, but they didn't believe me, so they just paid it.) Then we went over to the hotel to drop our luggage (check in isn't til 2, and it was only about 10 at this point) and meandered around Museum Island a bit, got lunch, and meandered some more. Walking back to the hotel, we found the Märkisches (provincial) Museum, which the subway stop is named for. It's in some old converted church apparently. It looks to be about the history of Mark Brandenburg, which could be interesting to visit someday.
We checked in to the hotel, Ben's parents showered, his brother finally showed up, and Ben discovered that the only piece of electronic equipment that *doesn't* take dual voltage was his 3DS charger, so he ran out to the Saturn at Alexanderplatz and bought a German USB plug with a 3DS cable. (He didn't actually fry his charger, he discovered when we got home.)
Then it was off to the Wall Documentation Center and dinner (at Oranium, where the game was on TV, and it took forever to get our food and drink for reasons unknown to us.)
The day started with breakfast at a coffee shop and a walking tour, then we went up the Reichstag cupola. There's a lot more rigamarole to get through than there was in 2007, but bomb threats will do that. At least it's open to the public again. Then we found dinner at a vegetarian Thai (mostly) place called Samadhi, and Ben's parents ate tofu without complaining. The ginger tea was fucking awesome. After that I think we just went back to the hotel. Oh, Ben and I went to the grocery store so we could have breakfast in our room.
We slept in a bit and headed over to the flea market at the Mauerpark. It's a big touristy thing, but it's fun (when it isn't raining). We spent a few hours there (and left before the karaoke started, sadly) then trekked (by tram) over to the Natural History Museum. That's pretty neat, and there's an impressive award-winning taxidermy collection. Taxidermy creeps me out, but museums have to show things somehow, I guess. I just always wonder how the animals died.
Dinner was at Dolores (probably our least expensive meal of the week), and it turns out that 8:30 pm Sunday is a great time to go to the TV Tower, because there's no line and the observation platform isn't packed.
The original itinerary had TV Tower and shopping, but we'd already covered the former. The German History Museum hadn't been on my radar much (other than a thing that exists) until I saw the placards for a special exhibit on World War 1. So we went to that, and spent a good 2.5 hours on one floor (prehistory to 1918), broke for lunch in the cafe, then split up for an hour to meet again. Ben and I went to the WW1 exhibit while the rest meandered through the 1918-present section. We barely had time to finish it, and we didn't get to any of the 20th century. You could easily spend days there.
Ben's brother's fiance is a high school teacher, and she teaches history. She remarked that there's so much she doesn't know about the world wars, or about European history (and how all the factors of European history affected everything). I'm sure she's a great teacher; it's just kinda sad that even the teachers only know a tiny bit about their subjects. That explains a lot about why American kids don't know much about history, though.
We had dinner on a boat! There's a historical port exhibit, with a lot of boats docked, some of which you can charter, and there's a restaurant on a boat. It's typical Berlin food (fish, boulettes, potatoes with quark), but the atmosphere was neat. There was a Stammtisch beside our table, which was also cool.
We made an excursion to Potsdam to see Sanssouci, the palace Frederick the Great built to get away from the wife he was forced to marry. There are other palaces in the gardens, and we saw several of them, including the Chinese Tea House, which is an epic manifestation of Chinoiserie. It's truly impressive in its garishness. The weather was great until we took a tour of the Orangerie, at which point it started pouring. So we waited for a lull, barely got one, and crammed onto a bus back to the train station.
The Orangerie has the original floors still! You have to put special slippers on over your shoes to protect the floor. All the windows are north-facing, so all the original decor and art is preserved. They've only had to replace the curtains, and the pattern is kept at the mills in Lyon, so they request it as needed. It's really neat.
Since we were in the vicinity, we took the opportunity to walk over to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, then to KaDeWe. We ate at the buffet there, which was ... a bit of a hassle. I picked my food, and by the time everyone else had gotten theirs, mine was cold. Delightful. But I had a huge cake for dessert, and that was delicious.
We got to the Pergamon Museum around 10:30 and stood in line for about an hour (in the rain, until we got into the colonnade). The security guard advised us to go to a different museum and come back in the afternoon, because they don't let people in until people have come out, and the museum only opened at 10.
So we went over to the Neues Museum, which has a bunch of Egyptian stuff, including the bust of Nefertiti. That took a while. The cafe was packed, so we couldn't eat there, and we ended up in the cafe in the history museum again. Then we went back to the Pergamon.
Ben and I met a friend from twitter,![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
smooney14, at the food court in Alexa for dinner, then we went back to the hotel. We probably got groceries, too.
Ben and I were blissfully free of familial obligations. We went to the David Bowie exhibit in the Martin-Gropius-Bau (which was so worth it: JARETH'S RIDING CROP!), met![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kriski for lunch in Dussmann's cafe, then went back to the hotel to drop our purchases and re-pack for the Germany-USA game at the fanmile. We met acari and ansgarius_90 and plowed through the crowd.
It was fun, until it started raining at halftime. This is Berlin, so it wasn't a nice, warm rain, no; it was a cold rain that brought cold air with it. On the plus side, the crowd thinned out, and I could see better. (I had my emergency plastic poncho in my bag.)
We realized we hadn't eaten since lunch, and it was about 8:30 pm (the late sunsets that far north in summer do bizarre things to your brain). So we made it back to the hotel and ate in the restaurant there. (Which we charged to the room, because I didn't have money.) It was quite good, actually.
We went as a group to the Topography of Terror, then split up at lunch. Ben and I went to the Olympic Stadium, Tom and Laurel went walking through Kreuzberg (which I am told was "more diverse because there are black people there" .... Oh, Americans. Turkish-Germans don't count as diversity, I guess.), and I have no idea what his parents did.
We reconvened for dinner at a place called Chipps, which is not related to the US restaurant chain of the same name afaict. Then we went home and packed.
Subway to bus to Tegel to Amsterdam to Detroit to Raleigh. We landed in RDU at what felt like 4 am, having been up for nearly 24 hours and in transit for a good 20 of them.
I dumped my pictures into dropbox. This link might work; I can't tell because I'm logged in.
Ben posted a bunch of photos on tumblr, and he collected them here. He had a photo pass for Sanssouci, so he got inside pictures, whereas I just got outside ones.
I feel really comfortable in Berlin. I can't get Ben to do much more than say "yeah, it could be fun" when I discuss moving. But that's an entirely different blog post, and this one's taken me an hour to write already.
Ben and I met his parents at the airport, where they paid 5,80 € for a 0.5 L bottle of Evian. Each. (I told them it was 5.80, but they didn't believe me, so they just paid it.) Then we went over to the hotel to drop our luggage (check in isn't til 2, and it was only about 10 at this point) and meandered around Museum Island a bit, got lunch, and meandered some more. Walking back to the hotel, we found the Märkisches (provincial) Museum, which the subway stop is named for. It's in some old converted church apparently. It looks to be about the history of Mark Brandenburg, which could be interesting to visit someday.
We checked in to the hotel, Ben's parents showered, his brother finally showed up, and Ben discovered that the only piece of electronic equipment that *doesn't* take dual voltage was his 3DS charger, so he ran out to the Saturn at Alexanderplatz and bought a German USB plug with a 3DS cable. (He didn't actually fry his charger, he discovered when we got home.)
Then it was off to the Wall Documentation Center and dinner (at Oranium, where the game was on TV, and it took forever to get our food and drink for reasons unknown to us.)
The day started with breakfast at a coffee shop and a walking tour, then we went up the Reichstag cupola. There's a lot more rigamarole to get through than there was in 2007, but bomb threats will do that. At least it's open to the public again. Then we found dinner at a vegetarian Thai (mostly) place called Samadhi, and Ben's parents ate tofu without complaining. The ginger tea was fucking awesome. After that I think we just went back to the hotel. Oh, Ben and I went to the grocery store so we could have breakfast in our room.
We slept in a bit and headed over to the flea market at the Mauerpark. It's a big touristy thing, but it's fun (when it isn't raining). We spent a few hours there (and left before the karaoke started, sadly) then trekked (by tram) over to the Natural History Museum. That's pretty neat, and there's an impressive award-winning taxidermy collection. Taxidermy creeps me out, but museums have to show things somehow, I guess. I just always wonder how the animals died.
Dinner was at Dolores (probably our least expensive meal of the week), and it turns out that 8:30 pm Sunday is a great time to go to the TV Tower, because there's no line and the observation platform isn't packed.
The original itinerary had TV Tower and shopping, but we'd already covered the former. The German History Museum hadn't been on my radar much (other than a thing that exists) until I saw the placards for a special exhibit on World War 1. So we went to that, and spent a good 2.5 hours on one floor (prehistory to 1918), broke for lunch in the cafe, then split up for an hour to meet again. Ben and I went to the WW1 exhibit while the rest meandered through the 1918-present section. We barely had time to finish it, and we didn't get to any of the 20th century. You could easily spend days there.
Ben's brother's fiance is a high school teacher, and she teaches history. She remarked that there's so much she doesn't know about the world wars, or about European history (and how all the factors of European history affected everything). I'm sure she's a great teacher; it's just kinda sad that even the teachers only know a tiny bit about their subjects. That explains a lot about why American kids don't know much about history, though.
We had dinner on a boat! There's a historical port exhibit, with a lot of boats docked, some of which you can charter, and there's a restaurant on a boat. It's typical Berlin food (fish, boulettes, potatoes with quark), but the atmosphere was neat. There was a Stammtisch beside our table, which was also cool.
We made an excursion to Potsdam to see Sanssouci, the palace Frederick the Great built to get away from the wife he was forced to marry. There are other palaces in the gardens, and we saw several of them, including the Chinese Tea House, which is an epic manifestation of Chinoiserie. It's truly impressive in its garishness. The weather was great until we took a tour of the Orangerie, at which point it started pouring. So we waited for a lull, barely got one, and crammed onto a bus back to the train station.
The Orangerie has the original floors still! You have to put special slippers on over your shoes to protect the floor. All the windows are north-facing, so all the original decor and art is preserved. They've only had to replace the curtains, and the pattern is kept at the mills in Lyon, so they request it as needed. It's really neat.
Since we were in the vicinity, we took the opportunity to walk over to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, then to KaDeWe. We ate at the buffet there, which was ... a bit of a hassle. I picked my food, and by the time everyone else had gotten theirs, mine was cold. Delightful. But I had a huge cake for dessert, and that was delicious.
We got to the Pergamon Museum around 10:30 and stood in line for about an hour (in the rain, until we got into the colonnade). The security guard advised us to go to a different museum and come back in the afternoon, because they don't let people in until people have come out, and the museum only opened at 10.
So we went over to the Neues Museum, which has a bunch of Egyptian stuff, including the bust of Nefertiti. That took a while. The cafe was packed, so we couldn't eat there, and we ended up in the cafe in the history museum again. Then we went back to the Pergamon.
Ben and I met a friend from twitter,
Ben and I were blissfully free of familial obligations. We went to the David Bowie exhibit in the Martin-Gropius-Bau (which was so worth it: JARETH'S RIDING CROP!), met
kriski for lunch in Dussmann's cafe, then went back to the hotel to drop our purchases and re-pack for the Germany-USA game at the fanmile. We met acari and It was fun, until it started raining at halftime. This is Berlin, so it wasn't a nice, warm rain, no; it was a cold rain that brought cold air with it. On the plus side, the crowd thinned out, and I could see better. (I had my emergency plastic poncho in my bag.)
We realized we hadn't eaten since lunch, and it was about 8:30 pm (the late sunsets that far north in summer do bizarre things to your brain). So we made it back to the hotel and ate in the restaurant there. (Which we charged to the room, because I didn't have money.) It was quite good, actually.
We went as a group to the Topography of Terror, then split up at lunch. Ben and I went to the Olympic Stadium, Tom and Laurel went walking through Kreuzberg (which I am told was "more diverse because there are black people there" .... Oh, Americans. Turkish-Germans don't count as diversity, I guess.), and I have no idea what his parents did.
We reconvened for dinner at a place called Chipps, which is not related to the US restaurant chain of the same name afaict. Then we went home and packed.
Subway to bus to Tegel to Amsterdam to Detroit to Raleigh. We landed in RDU at what felt like 4 am, having been up for nearly 24 hours and in transit for a good 20 of them.
I dumped my pictures into dropbox. This link might work; I can't tell because I'm logged in.
Ben posted a bunch of photos on tumblr, and he collected them here. He had a photo pass for Sanssouci, so he got inside pictures, whereas I just got outside ones.
I feel really comfortable in Berlin. I can't get Ben to do much more than say "yeah, it could be fun" when I discuss moving. But that's an entirely different blog post, and this one's taken me an hour to write already.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-04 06:21 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-07-05 01:39 am (UTC)From:I hope Ben & I move there and you can come visit :D