Berlin is always Berlin

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Berlin bleibt Berlin. There are still quite a few leafs still on the trees and at the same time Its been a while since I’ve seen leafs so big !!!! The apartment turns out to be quite nice and large in a pre-WW2 building….probably with the original elevator. The kitchen is well equipped with a 2 burner hot plate, a microwave, coffee maker, pots & pans, dishes and cutlery. The bathroom has a nice large tiled shower. Usually, there are a few staples in the kitchen, but not this time. After meeting Stuart at his apartment, we went to Tims Canadian Deli for a delicious brunch…..outside believe it or not…..and then had a walk thru the Winterfeldplatz Saturday market. Meats, veggies, cheese, clothes, staples, odds and ends….most everything you can imagine. Tho the temperature was in the low 50s, I was still wrapped up in the scarf I had bought there in May. Then we went off to Keisers SuperMarket to buy things for dinner as well as coffee, filters, milk, cereal, eggs, bread pastries for my apartment. Stuart picked up some asparagus, potato pankakes and chicken cordon-blue with red wine which he put together for our dinner. After dinner….of course we went bar hopping. It does take a bit of getting used to pitch dark at 4:30 in the afternoon.

On Sunday, after a filling breakfast, we met up to go to the super large flea market at the Tiergarten. Trying to find ship stuff is always a challenge, but there were a few things I bought. Berlin is always changing….maybe it’s a building that’s missing, or a new building, or new subway cars but there is always something to see. Over the years, I’ve been to a neighborhood Italian restaurant because it was affordable and good so that was the plan for dinner. Sunday evening was bar time again and when I got back to my building, my elevator key did not bring the car down……so I had to walk up 4 flights of stairs and hoped I had found the right apartment door because they all looked alike, did not have numbers and very little to differentiate it from the neighbors.

Monday, Stuart and I met again for brunch at Café Berio until he had to leave for Tegel Airport. I thought I’d go to Pariser Platz and see if anything was going on at the
American Embassy….there wasn’t. I walked around, did a little shopping, stopped for a coffee and pastry and had a nice leisurely day. I cooked in tonight so I managed to save a couple Euro !!!!!!

Tuesday was Election Day in the USA and everywhere I went people were asking me about it, once they figured I was American. I had pre-booked a walking tour of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and duly met the group of 12 at the Zoo train station for the 25 minute rapid train out of the city. The camp really was used from 1933 to 1945 mainly as a concentration camp, but there also was a small section, Section Z, that was used for executions and, yes, gassing. There were 3 crematoria there as well as a medical experiment building. It held as many as 45,000 people at one time, but by the time the British arrived, there were only a couple thousand people in the infirmary……the guards and some 30, 000 people having evacuated the camp just the day before. When the British found the marchers in the woods a day or two later, even the Nazi guards had disappeared. It was all a somber reminder that man is very capable of atrocities against fellow humans.

I’ll tell you about election night in the next chapter.

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