Berlin - Report 1

Monday, May 19, 2008

We got a train at 11 o'clock from Dresden to Berlin (nonstop). We did not have a seat reservation because they had been useless from Prague to Dresden, and I ended up standing. The conductor finally came, and I pointed to the one empty seat where a woman told me it had been reserved. It wasn't reserved until the next light, so the conductor gave me the seat. It was a two hour train ride. Once you got a cab at the new Berlin railroad station, I made another mistake. I told the driver, who spoke excellent English, that the hotel was at 78 Kurferstendamstrasse, when it was really at 78 Kurfurstenstrasse -- about 4 km away. He was a nice guy and turned off the meter, which is already a $25. Our hotel, and Express Holiday Inn, was the cheapest we could find in Berlin -- we had an extremely small, but highly efficient, room.

We went for a walk in late afternoon to Potsdammer Platz, which was an enormous empty lot when we were here 12 years ago (it had not been developed because the Berlin Wall had run through it). Now it is full of modern buildings -- the Sony Center is a large enclosed space with restaurants etc. in a glass ceiling about 20 stories high. We walk through the nearby cultural District and saw the Neue Nationalgalerie, an Eero Sarineen building, on the way home. We had been at a reception there in 1981. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant next to the hotel, where the food is actually quite good. We even went back to it on our last night.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

We bought a three-day bus pass and took the bus to Museum Island, which is in the heart of East Berlin. We went to the Pergamon Museum, which we had also visited in 1996, and saw the Pergamon Temple which had been moved here from Turkey, and the Babylonian Gates of Ishtar. We have visited Pergamon on our trip to Turkey in 2004, and had seen the site from which the temple had been taken.

We had lunch near the museum and then walked to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, which had been the home of the German Parliament. It had been burned in 1933, shortly after the Nazis took over, and badly damaged in 1945. In the 1990s, it was rebuilt with an enormous glass dome on top and is now the major tourist attraction in Berlin. We and all the other tourists walked around on the roof, with views all over the city. One unfortunate sight was a fire with much smoke in the Philharmonie -- the Philharmonic Hall -- right near the Potsdammer Platz. That night we went to an Argentine steakhouse for dinner, which was a nice change -- and only 100 yards from the hotel.