Showers are for flowers! And we were people, so we employed the grease of our bodies to more easily slip into our clothes and onward to a day of Pure Tourism. You have to have at least one day like that, or you won't recognize the city when it shows up in the movies!
Coffee first (our second cup!) at a convenient little place where the burek was curled up like a snail's shell. Soft and weird and just what I wanted. A descent into the U-Bahn station, and we were off to a neighborhood called Prenzlauerberg.
A sweet little park had strange little climbing structures shaped like paintbrushes and an artist's palette. It was like the abandoned set of a children's show. I touched my toe to a trampoline and gave a little scream.
Pear and fennel juice at a packed little place with mismatched wooden tables and big plates of cheese and meat. A baby crawled on the floor and a toddler played with blocks. Sara remarked on how nice it was for the kids to be able to just be. Without parents helicoptering around them, hovering and controlling. The adults get to eat, the kids get to explore. It's all cool.
Something in the water in the States has made everyone think everyone else is a pedophile ready to snatch their snowflake. Or you'll take your eye of your kid for two seconds and be responsible for the death of a zoo's gorilla. The ultimate citizen lives in a gated community with a shotgun on her knees, the kids inside studying the Sears catalog.
We read our books and enjoyed a quiet meal.
Afterward, a healthy walk to Mauerpark where shone one of the best outdoor community flea markets I've seen. I didn't think places like this existed anymore, tent after tent of cheap nonsense from people's attics. A few creeps selling their homemade soap and iPhone cases with googly eyes and whatever, but mostly brass buckets of nonsense. It was heaven.
Sara was quite taken with a strange rack of old industrial science posters. They looked like something salvaged from the break room at a machine shop or vocational school. One was for Industry in the United States and showed the US with little symbols showing what we build and where.
Several cities were the hearts of the "lebensmittel" industry, a word we kept seeing but I couldn't translate. It looks like "middle life" to me, but that makes no sense in context. It would remain a mystery!
They had some killer records there, hilarious German pop hits and a rare Klaus Nomi record, but I didn't want to lug them around in Slovenia. Was I being a fool? Shouldn't one buy Nomi when one sees him?
It was the first sunny day since either of us had arrived, but the ground was wet and muddy, so we went in search of drier climes. I won't soon forget that marvelous swap meet. A very fine place to find very fine piles of old keys.
Quick tea-break at a crazy-cool cafe with Bauhaus-style decorations and some spicy-ass chai. Then we followed our phones back underground to the train to Alexanderplatz. We emerged to find that mostly famous place mostly under construction.
Past the claw machines, we hopped on a tour bus and took that sight-filled ride down Unter den Linden street. All the architectural marvels of Postcard Berlin floated by. Neptune's Fountain! That Cathedral! The Museum! The Brandenburg Gate!
We got off at the gate, took a few pictures, and walked over to the Memorial to the Murdered. A strange, sober modern monument to the Holocaust dead. A labyrinth of stark, concrete rectangles of varying sizes and lengths, kind of like graves, but also kind of... not. Like, maybe it was a negative-space thing? There was no signage, and I kind of liked it that way.
Then tea and sausages and a walk under the shady leaves of the lindens. A quick visit to the nonsensical Ampelmann store where you can buy condoms and gold balls and USB sticks featuring the image of that jaunty, helpful, little dude.
A quick pilgrimage to the Marx and Engels statue and a cheerful moment in the park watching children manifest enormous soap bubbles. Neptune's Fountain up close is a marvel. Magnificent details of capricornic beasts struggling in nets, fisherwomen tending goats. It rewarded the close attention we gave it.
Sara likes details like that. The chunky shoes and striped socks of an otherwise boring statue give her great pleasure. I usually focus on the "story" of the statue. We took some time to look at one where a dude with a smug face had his finger in a bible as if to say, "Scoreboard, heathens!"
The sun was getting low in the sky, so we hailed a cab and bade him take us to Teufelsberg, the Devil's own mountain.
A long ride toward and then past the magnificent Victory Column. Tall and majestic and commemorating a victory of the Prussians over the Danes in the 1860s. Probably the last time this loser gang of mustache-thugs won anything. Got their pointy helmets melted in the Great One, and their crooked crosses crushed in the Big One. Guess they can always say they beat Denmark once.
Winding, corkscrewing route past the Olympic Stadium and up, up, up to an abandoned radar station, an old sky-high listening outpost where Our Boys would spy on the Reds. Long since deserted, it's been colonized by the Spray-Can Set and features magnificent murals in an eerie aerie. Eerie aerie! Eerie aerie!
We took a chilly little walk past some truly wonderful artworks and monstrous old threshing equipment. At the top, a killer eagle's nest under a vinyl dome where the sun fired golden lasers in tribute. Kids drank beer and toasted their youth and bravery.
Here the vandals were kings, and the king's image had a dripping x over each eye.
The park closed at dark and no taxis were waiting at the gating. It was going to be a long, cold walk down the mountain and who knew what lurked in the valley below? I hunched my shoulders to take the plunge, but Sara pulled out her phone and called a cab.
How? "Oh," she said, "It's simple, really. I bought an international phone plan." I've.. never done that. It really worked. It really worked.
A few moments later, a little Citroen puttered up, and it was Escape from Witch Mountain!
The driver spoke little English but knew every word of Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? He turned the radio up and sang along.
He dumped us off at the stadium, and it was a long, long U-Bahn ride back in the dark. Drunks leaned on one another and rolled around in a jostling peasant's dance. A baby in a fur hat commanded everyone's attention.
We had forgotten to validate our metro tickets and feared the secret police, but the cops kept their secrets to themselves, and we got away with it.
To celebrate our crime, we toasted our villainy at the China Box and went home to look up "lebensmittel" in the dictionary. It means... groceries? That... can't be right.
Then it was a thwarted attempt to find a morning train to Gorlitz, a giving up, and a sudden blackout in the spicy sheets.
I awoke to find her reading a book with oranges on the cover. Was it about oranges? I was too wiped out to ask. A full day in, under, and above Berlin.
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