Museums, parks and palaces

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Back in Berlin, we spend one night at Alex's place, who was kind enough to help us out again. We meet his Portuguese girlfriend Amelia, whose German is coming along quite nicely, and whose English is just about perfect. She says Alex always tells her how bad her German is and constantly corrects her. I guess that's probably just his way of being pedagogic, in his rough German kind of way.
The following day, we finally go to our first of the five museums on Museumsinsel, the New Museum. Its most famous exhibit is the 3300-year old iconic bust of Nofretete (I prefer to use the German term, as 'Nefertiti' looks and sounds odd to me), which is a stunningly beautiful work of art of a real hot chick, especially taking into consideration how old she is. Taking pictures is a no-no in the room where the bust is, so no pictures of her in this blog.
It is nearly impossible to take in everything in Neues Museum in one day. The Egyptian collection alone is probably one of the biggest and most precious in the world, and there is also a section dedicated to artifacts from Troy, a Greek hall, a Cypriot and a Nordic art section.

On the train, I ask a well-dressed lady in her sixties to move, so I can sit next to Dunja, but she makes a sourish face and tells me: "Ich bin doch aber gerade schon rübergerutscht. Da sitzt eine Schwarze." She has this look in her eyes that says, "you know how those Negroes are, and who would want to sit next to them anyway", and I just sit down between her and the 'Schwarze', a slightly overweight Indian girl reading a Serbian newspaper. When the girl gets off the train, the lady's eyes (and mine as well) follow her, then she looks at me again, her eyes saying "See what I mean?", as though I was her co-conspirator.

In the afternoon, we meet our new hosts, Andrea and Birk. It turns out to be quite hard to get through to them and break the ice, and it doesn't help either that they don't even offer us some tea or drink, which, at least in my book, is the first thing to do when you welcome guests. They are huge fans of FC St. Pauli, consequently they're still exhausted from a long weekend of celebrating the club's promotion to First Division.

We visit the excellent German Film and TV-Museum inside the Sony Centre. The first room you enter is a hall full of cleverly installed mirrors with some TV monitors in between. Looking down, you get the feeling of looking into an endless space, which gives me vertigo. All periods of German film history are covered, from its beginnings in 1895 to the first German silent film-star Henny Porten as well as her English and American counterparts Asta Nielsen and Fern Andra, the Golden Twenties with 'Metropolis' and 'Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari', Marlene Dietrich, the Nazi Era with Leni Riefenstahl's and other propaganda films, and the Postwar-era to contemporary German film. The TV section is less interesting, and the temporary exhibition on Romy Schneider ends up being a bit depressing.

Later that night, we go out for a walk around Friedrichshain with Andrea and Birk. They take us to 'Vöner', a vegetarian Döner shop, which features a rotary spit with seitan instead of meat. They have different burgers as well, but I try the Vöner, and it ends up being really damn tasty, and good value for money, which is also kind of important.

In the morning, Dunja hops on her flight back to Zagreb, and I'm on my own again. I have breakfast in a bakery, which is owned by Turkish people, like pretty much every bakery in Berlin. The brezel I get ends up being quite stale and not nice. I quarrel with myself for a while, then finally go and tell the sales girl that the brezel is not good, expecting the worst case scenario, something like "So what? Go fuck yourself if you don't like it, you German Schweinehund!", but she just smiles and wants to give me another one, but I ask for a poppyseed-roll, and when she wants to give me three, I feel bad and we finally agree on two. Quite a pleasant surprise, indeed.

I then continue on to Potsdam, the former Prussian capital, where I meet my new host, Anda from Latvia, and later her German husband Ralf. This time, it's the other way round: we get along very well immediately and seem to be on one wavelength, but for some reason after a while it all freezes over, and she always looks at me as though she was thinking "What are you? Stupid?". Ralf is even worse, he's the type of petty tyrant who uses subtle psychology to put his wife into place and make himself feel superior. But they seem to be happy in a dull kind of way. In the morning they come out of their bedroom together in matching bathrobes, thinking "Oh, great, that fucker is still there...". I don't know how it got to that point, but maybe it has something to do with me putting the keys on the table, and not hanging them neatly on the hook, or me not finding the sugar despite Anda's frantic pointing: "No, left. Look at me. Left. No, not there. Behind you, on the shelf. No. Left. No. Yeah."
I ask her if she usually eat cereal or müsli for breakfast, but she just makes a face and says "No, bread and sausages. Human food.", pronouncing the last sentence very slowly to make it understood how dumb I am, and how ridiculous it is not to eat meat. But at least she makes an effort cooking a meatless dinner, spaghetti with a deepfrozen veggie mix and no sauce. I use Bionade as a lubricant to wash it all down.

But, she lends me her bike, of which I take advantage extensively, spending the whole day riding around Babelsberg, the part of Potsdam where they live, and Potsdam itself. I pass through Park Babelsberg, visit Schloss Babelsberg, only to be greatly disappointed by it, as the rooms of the Palace have not been preserved in their original state, even worse, most of them are empty, and there are only a few pictures how the interior used to look like.
I cross the Glienicke Bridge, which gained fame as a border crossing between East and West Germany where the US and the Soviet Union exchanged spies. I visit Schloss Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference took place shortly fater the end of WWII in 1945, with Stalin, Truman and Churchill negotiating the establishment of post-war order in Germany.
After riding through the centre of Potsdam and its picturesque 18th-century Dutch Quarter, I take a first glimpse of Schloss Sanssouci and its tranquil and spacious park. There's no bike-riding within the park, one can only circumnavigate it on one track, which is good enough for me to get a first impression.

That night, I take the train to Berlin and go to 'Köpi', a squat that's been existing for over 20 years. There's a punk show with three bands playing, two Swedish, one Berlinerish. The Swedes share their bass and guitar player, and before the first band starts, the drummer and singer of the last band to play are already drunk, and merrily mosh about the place, in a non-karate punk rock kind of way, which I approve of, naturally. During the Berliner band's set, the same drummer seems to be even more drunk than before, falling down repeatedly without outside interference, and not wanting to get up again, despite the persistent pulling of some diligent German aides. When it's his band's turn, I'm amazed to see that he manages to pull of a killer performance, it must be the Swedish genes or something. I'd already forgot how much fun punk shows can be, when everybody has fun, you don't have to watch out for slam-dancing idiots with their 50 Cent-hats, expensive branded clothes and brass knuckle tattoos.

The next day I go back to Sanssouci by bike, determined to enter the Palace this time. The €12-entrance fee puts me off a bit, so I take a look at the books in the souvenir shop to find out if it's really worth going. I conclude that there's enough to see in the park itself, and I go and visit that one instead.
Afterwards, I ride another 10km out to Wannsee, of course to visit the Haus der Wannseekonferenz, where a group of mostly unknown Nazi bureaucrats got together to decide on the Final Solution, and to take a swim in the beautiful lake. The ticket vendor is a Cameroonian, and we chat for a while about travelling in Africa and which places to better avoid. He says if I want to visit Cameroon, he'll ask his brother to take me around, and I promise to make use of his kind offer.
The house itself has been converted into a museum, although there are not many exhibits, except a copy of the conference protocol. There is a lot of information on the lengthy martyrdom of the European Jews and the process that led to the Holocaust. I learn some new facts, but most things were already known to me, so I go on the free tour, which ends up being too short and superficial, unfortunately. I do learn, though, that the Final Solution was not really decided on that conference, which makes sense when you look at the participants, all no-name pen-pushers except Heydrich, Freisler and Eichmann, who didn't have the authority to decide on something of such far-reaching historic consequences.

The following morning, I bid farewell semi-awkwardly to Anda and Ralf, and take the train back to Berlin.
The End.

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