Thursday, September 25

Our last day in town.

Sue Anne grabbed her sketchbook and made a final pass through our neighborhood. Then she assembled a small collection of drawings that capture the spirit of the city. Expect to see lots more of her work in the next edition of her art blog www.colorfuljourney.art.

Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the steeple left in its bombed and ruined state. Most things in Berlin have been rebuilt, either reconstructed to match the former state before the war, or completely redone as contemporary. This was left unrestored (though shored up), as a memorial. Ink and watercolor

Alexanderplatz, a double spread drawing in the sketchbook. All this is in one plaza — market tents, a tramline, a beer garden, a bungee jumping thing, and a double decker carousel.

Two brick buildings near Savignyplatz, at the end of our hotel’s street. They are both next to the elevated train line, in yellow brick. Bookstores and restaurants fill the archways under the tracks.

 Checkpoint Charlie, from the former East Berlin side. The sign is a photograph of an actual American soldier who was a guard at this location. Our lunch is in the foreground.

We sat in a café to rest our feet. The signs say “The German People”, “City Round Trips”, and “Ice Cream for Children”.  A view of the Reichstag building with its glass dome.

Two doors on Grolmanstraße. On the left, our hotel door. On the right, the door to an art gallery across the street. Both Art Nouveau style, maybe reconstructed. Wood, glass, and iron.

We made our final visit to Miro for a delightful lunch. 

 

Hot ginger tea, with real slices of ginger, yum.

There’s a printed menu inside (German and English), but special offerings are displayed on 4 or 5 blackboards outside, frequently updated. Here’s the one for breakfast opportunities.

Beyond all that, most of today was dedicated to wrapping things up. We will be heading home tomorrow morning, a 26 hour experience. Once we’re settled there, we will be reviewing the entire blog for updates, tweaks, and miscellaneous corrections. Then we plan to post a lot more photos that help illustrate the spirit of the place, and finally conclude with a summary of our overall impressions.

Stay tuned.

Wednesday, September 25

Today we headed over to a reconstructed section of the Wall where international artists had been given free reign to present their artistic statements. It’s called the East Side Gallery. It’s been pretty well preserved, i.e. there’s not much graffiti marring the original work. Some of the work has been updated over time. 

We found most of the art to be quite inspirational.

This is a very iconic scene. We had even bought a postcard of it before knowing of its origin.

The woman is real. She added to the picture!

The back side of the wall was left open to the graffiti artists, and they struck with full force.

Does anybody know that person in the upper left?

In the background: The German National Bird 

The construction crane

Berliners have a clever term for everything.

This part of the Wall is on the bank of a river, which was the actual border. Once we got to the end of the Wall, we came across quite a marvelous scene of brick bridges and towers, some of which had featured in the artwork. And we consumed another curry wurst.

Looking up at the back side of the Wall from the river

The amazing Oberbaumbrücke (bridge), along with a floating hotel made up of two anchored boats

Then an uncaptioned walk along the rather funky Skalitzer Straße to a subway stop in a Turkish part of town.

After a brief subway ride and a walk along the river, we were at the Reichstag building with its recently added (post-Wall) glass dome. We had hoped to take a tour on previous visits but the lines were much too long. Seeing no lines this time we thought we must have won, but we learned that now they were using timed tickets, the tickets were gone for today, and they were only available at inconvenient times tomorrow. So, next time we’re in Berlin we will get our tickets on Day One of the visit.

 An Orangina and a beer, some sketching, a walk to the subway station, and back to our hotel.

The Reichstag on the right, and the new Bundestag on the left

At the subway station

Streets in the Bundestag area are named after renowned statesmen. Nearby are two more such streets, named after John Foster Dulles and Yitzhak Rabin.

The day concluded with a very ample dinner at the Black and White Turkish restaurant.

 

Tuesday, September 24

The major event today was Bruce’s visit to the Spy Museum, very close to where we had been yesterday. We can only handle one museum per day.

The museum offered a very complete view of the business, starting at biblical times and continuing right up to the present. It addressed a lot of aspects of things, complete with many real world examples that had become public knowledge.

An early example of Industrial Espionage, during the Industrial Revolution.

The American textile industry employed similar tactics against the British.

Exhibit of the famed German Enigma crypto equipment.

They considered it unbreakable, but our efforts at Bletchley Park proved them wrong. 

Getting closer to contemporary times

Model of spy swap at the Glieneke Bridge

Probably Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel,

as seen in the movie Bridge of Spies

Young kid modeling his spy disguise.

There was another kid running around in a giant Afro wig.

I chose not to photograph him, in case he might some day enter politics and find his career ruined if the photo ever surfaced.

Poster in the gift shop

My souvenirs of the visit

I didn’t need the clues to punch out my name in Morse Code.

Monday, September 23

Monday has dawned, the stores are open (very tight laws about that in Germany), and it’s time to make good on the promise to return to the Caran d’Ache store. We had a very pleasant conversation with the woman on duty, learned a lot about the history of the company, and exchanged greetings with the proprietor, who did indeed remember us from the other night. And we left suitably enriched with more of their world class art supplies.

Kid in a candy shop

Our next stop was the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. It’s a place we have been visiting ever since Bruce’s early business trips here. It started out quite small, as the Wall was still up and all it could commemorate was escapes that had received so much publicity that there was no concern about accidentally releasing escape secrets or endangering family members still on the other side. Once the Wall came down, that restriction pretty much went away. The place got much larger, and it told lots more stories.

What we saw on this trip was way much larger than anything before. It went farther back into the history of postwar German partition, and into much greater detail about specific escapes and other situations.

We are still amused at the memory from our 2000 visit of a young British boy asking his mother, “Who was Charlie, and what did he do?” Nope, there wasn’t a Charlie, nor have they invented one as a mascot. It was simply the letter C in the military phonetic alphabet. Checkpoint Alpha was at the East-West Zone Border in Helmstedt on the official Allied land route to Berlin, Checkpoint Bravo was where the highway from Alpha entered West Berlin, and Checkpoint Charlie was the third in the series, one of the few official crossing points between West Berlin and East Berlin.

On our 2013 trip we were advised by two local ‘experts’ that the museum was not worth going to. We respectfully disagree, though timing did prevent our visiting it on that trip.

The name Checkpoint Charlie is with us forever. It’s even been enshrined in the name of the local subway stop.

Care packages arriving from the US

A big linguistic problem - Some of the boxes were labeled with the words like ‘Gift from the people of the United States’. Unfortunately ‘gift’ means ‘poison’ in German.

Documentation of deaths in Soviet prison camps

Many efforts are underway to validate this information and locate relatives.

Children’s art, based on a famous photo

Escape in two suitcases

Escape in a home made airplane

No, Sue Anne wasn’t sitting on the plane. She was in a regular seat in the next room.

Escape in a model cow

The famed Russian-born cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, by then Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC and stripped of his Soviet citizenship, flew in to Berlin when the Wall came down and presented his own tribute of Bach compositions to the occasion. You can read about it (and watch a video with sound) at this link.

The event has also been remembered in a statue at the museum, shown above with an adjacent photo of the performance and the opportunity to listen with the headphones. Plus some background photos of the unforgettable scene.

Then it was time to head back to our hotel, stopping for more curry wurst along the way, and taking note of the bilingual spelling on the Canadian Embassy.