Hauptstadt Berlin

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OK, you read all the trauma and drama of the Norwegian “sceneryathon” so this will seem a bit anticlimactic. Our flight to Berlin actually arrived early at Schoenefeld Airport - the former main airport of the DDR (Deutsch Democratik Republic) and now home to a slew of discount airlines. A bus and cab combination got us in front of the building where I had rented an apartment. We were a half hour early for the meeting time, so we waited outside….and we waited….waited past our 1:00 PM meeting…and waited even more. I asked a guy who was sitting on his balcony if he knew where Andreas might be. Long story short….Andreas flew to Chicago for a long weekend and the booking agency was closed until 4 PM. We needed a room and I’ve stayed at the nearby “no star” Sachsenhof many times, so they recognized me (gee…how?) and offered a room at 80 Euro for the night. Back I went to the apartment building to collect Dick and our luggage where, in the meantime, a friend of this guy Andreas called our new balcony friend to ask if he had seen anyone and thus the problem was solved….we had our apartment. Seems Andreas had sent me an eMail on the 16th with a revised meeting arrangement and I never checked that part of my mail!! Now of course I couldn’t get out of the Sachsenhof room, so I stayed there and Dick used the apartment.

Now the apartment which cost 50 Euro per night. A large room with a large bed, a sofa bed, a TV, stereo, small kitchen and bath/shower room, small balcony and a welcome bottle of mineral water and red wine. Not bad, huh? Well….the balcony overlooked 4 garages and the wall of another building….sun has never shined in here! The showerhead was dangling….the room itself was cold… .at least by my standards (and the heat had been turned off for the summer)….lighting, to be honest, sucked….the jam in the cabinet was moldy…..you get the picture….hehehe. Ah but the sofa bed was unlike anything I’d ever seen and took a ½ hour to figure out cause the foot extension kept collapsing. Now remember…..we’d had about 2 hours of sleep the night before on the Norwegian train!!!!!! In spite of everything, we made the best of it….and my trusty Swiss army knife fixed the shower head.

Berlin, for those of you who might not have heard me gush about it, is a fascinating city for students of history and its’ live and let live attitude. Bus #100 gave us a sort of quick overview of many of the sights followed by an excellent dinner at a very typical German restaurant in the Europa Center. We also walked thru the Brandenburg Gate, the new Holocost Memorial, the oldest church in the city (where we caught part of a choral concert rehearsal). On Sunday, we took the suburban train to Wannsee and saw the Glieneke Bridge (where spies were exchanged), the House of the Wannsee conference where the “final solution” was settled, Cecilienhof Palace (where the Potsdam conference was held at the end of WW2), a bit of Potsdam and followed by a quick rush back to midtown Berlin so we could attend Vesper services at the main city cathedral….primarily to hear the magnificent organ. Monday was spent primarily with seeing sights related to the Berlin Wall, the SS headquarters and a visit to the only partly rebuilt New Synagog.

Next on tap is a day trip down to Dresden where I hope to see the rebuilt Marienkirche (Church of Our Lady) and the newly restored and opened “Green Vault” (would you believe lots of jade walls??) in the Zwinger Palace. So its time to end this epistle and you’ll have one more (and final) installment of this trip blog.

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