visiting Berlin, Europe's edgiest city

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Hello fellow travelers!
This is my first entry and I'm excited to share my thoughts about travel, the challenges of traveling when you're older, and my love of Europe's most interesting city, Berlin, Germany.

First my initial thoughts about Berlin before I got to know its very complex ins and outs. Before I experienced it, Berlin scared the beejesus out of me. I saw it as the heart of the Nazi experience and feared that this ugly stain lingered on its current complexion. I also suspected that Berlin's sad history had left it with an ugly facade that reflected an unsightly past. I feared, too, that the people who populate Germany's capitol would be as brusque and rude as the New Yorkers with which they're often compared.
A little of this proved true. Most did not. Berlin IS a city of hard edges. You trip over its troubled history at every corner. It’s trapped, to a degree, by a turbulent past it often seems reluctant to abandon. But Berlin is also a place for the avant guard in art, fashion, and just plain weird stuff. Berlin is a mixture of fussy Baroque architecture, ugly Communist Plattenbauen (flat-fronted, high rise apartment buildings), and postmodern representations of the trendiest in building design. Berlin is a city of wonder and delight faintly colored by a pal of sadness, the legacy of its complex roots.

I love Berlin--not for its beauty, although some parts are every bit as beautiful as Paris. Berlin captured my heart because of its character. Like an aging prizefighter with a relentless need to win, Berlin struggles to its feet after even the hardest blows. It’s a city with raw, gutsy courage.

Here's how my love affair with Berlin began. About ten years ago I recognized something about myself. I was getting old. Oh, physically I still looked pretty good. I was only 50, after all. But I had begun to feel fearful more and more of the time. I dreaded becoming a little old lady in a little box peering out at life through a tiny safe peephole.

It started with a fear of bridges. My family and I often shared a summer cottage with my brother in D.C. and his family. The drive from northern Virginia to the eastern shore of Delaware includes a hair-raising trip over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge--four and a half miles of terror. At the same time my fear of bridges was rearing its ugly head, my fear of heights escalated (an unplanned pun, really). This second fear made itself known on a hike along the High Line Trail in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

Soon after these twin fears developed my husband and I planned our first trip to Europe and I found myself facing another anxiety about what I’d find there—Germans still living under the dark cloud of WW2? French too haughty to give me the time of day even as I greeted them enthusiastically in my high school French? Italians hopelessly disorganized but exercising their right to pinch every female fanny in sight? I’m exaggerating, of course, but I needed reassurance from my husband and my youngest son (an experienced world travel at age 17) that I was going to another country, not another world.

More to come from my adventures in Berlin. Please let me know if you've shared similar experiences. I'd love to hear your reactions to what I hope will be the first of many entries taken from my (as yet to be published) book, THE CHEAPEST DATE IN BERLIN.


Love from a Berlin Mom

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