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gartdavis-blog · 7 years ago

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Berlin September 2016

Started this trip on a Friday morning… I’d booked a new option, the Norwegian air shuttle that started 787 services from JFK to a couple transatlantic destinations. They have an economy plus class that is basically like a domestic first class - seats have plenty of pitch, and the prices are similar to a normal economy ticket. I got to RDU with a bit of time to spare. My flight to JFK delayed, so it was good that I’d booked a very long layover. I spent the day and the evening in the Terminal 8 Admirals club.

This was the day that mom was in the hospital with an uncertain diagnosis. I talked with Paul a couple times, and then with Mom. Things were looking better so I decided to carry on with my trip. I crossed to terminal 1, which was full of humanity; it was a little nutty, nearly in the same category as Santo Domingo. The lines were immense, but I discovered the economy plus had its own line, still quite long. Made it to the gate and got aboard without too much fuss. The seat was actually comfortable for sitting, but just didn’t work well for dozing. Not a comfortable night.

Arrived in Oslo midday. Small airport… about the size of the main terminal at RDU, but pleasant. Classically Scandinavian, full of wood. I paid for access to a lunch buffet and found a quiet corner and had one of those scrambled naps where one awakens disconnected from certainties of time and space.

When I’d booked tickets I’d looked for hotels and found all the usual suspects either sold out our charging triple - 300-500 euro for rooms typically under a hundred on a slow week. This has happened before, and I’ve always just worked it day by day. I decided to do that on this trip.

My connector to Berlin left at 5:30. When I woke around 330 I looked at options for Saturday and Sunday night decided to avoid the Berlin situation, so I booked a hotel in Potsdam for Saturday night to explore a bit. Potsdam is home to Sans Souci, Frederick the great’s country place built in the 1740s. Its referred to as the Prussian answer to the Louis the XIV palace at Versailles. Where the French royals used a super serious baroque style with lots of religious imagery, Frederick, who is more of a free thinker, adopted a rococo style so random that they call it Frederician Rococo. I picked a place along the lake on Zeppelinstrasse outside of downtown.

The flight arrived on time at Schoenfeld. Berlin has two supremely ugly airports - Tegel was for the West, and Schoenfeld was for East Berlin. In theory they’ll be replaced by Brandenberg Intl, which is on the scale of Heathrow, but for the time being the arrival is -very- anti-climactic. I went to the s-bahn station, and for 3 Euros got an ABC one way commuter ticket - this zone includes Potsdam even though its well outside the city. I went to the hotel, checked in, dumped my stuff, reserved a bike for the next day, and went to an Italian trattoria in the same building. I had a lasagna that was absolutely killer, and walked it off by walking the town for a couple hours.

Potsdam is a city like Denmark is a country… fingers of land surrounded by water. The main part of town is in the middle of the Octopus, and the liveliest part is near Brandenburger Tor near the front gates to Sans Souci park. It has interesting layers of history. Its home to the oldest film studio in the world, where ‘Metropolis’ was filmed in the 1920s, and Many of Marlene Dietrich’s early films as well. To this day, that era dictates the politically acceptable version of glamour that shines darkly at you from all the banner advertising in Germany. I didn’t get out to the studio… perhaps next time. The town itself is clean and cheerful in the same way that Berlin is grimy and relaxed.

My room turned out to be on the corner of the hotel with windows on two walls looking out on the water. As was true throughout this trip, the weather was cool and delightful. I woke late, booked a room right next to Brandenburger Tor for that night, got on my bike, and headed out along the lake; there was a trail that followed the shore invitingly. About three miles up I came to an athletic park that turns out to have been the principal training ground for olympic athletes during the heyday of the GDR olympic movement. It was classic cold-war communist architecture, where it was easy for me to imagine the anabolic steroid-ridden athletes looking like the Stasi villains of 70s Bond films. A little further up the lake there was a placard describing the history of the park. Apparently it was built on the green lakeside fields where giant rigid dirigible Zeppelins came and went before WWII.

My ride swung around and ran all through Park Sans Souci, which is just as grand as advertised. I didn’t buy tickets and tour the buildings… I mostly wanted to get a flavor for the park and the grounds, which is where Frederick put most of his efforts. I returned my bike with many thanks and changed to the hotel in town. I left my stuff and found a Viennese wine cafe, and had bread and a selection of French cheeses for dinner. Good, but a -lot- of dairy to process.

Next morning was Monday, so I grabbed a train and headed into the office at Thiemannstrasse. For hotels, it turned out that there was an enormous conference that used up all Berlin’s convention space and hotels Tuesday through Friday. I lucked into the Odeberger hotel on the first night, and ate really well at a little thai joint across the street. This is a hotel in Prenzlauerberg that was a grand Victorioan Schwimmhalle built in 1898. Berliners are serious about their indoor swimming. After the wall came down, the pool was boarded over and the space hosted squatters and punk rock shows. Its being restored into a tony hotel, but is still under construction. Weird, super-thick walls. Strange, interesting authentic steampunk.

Tuesday night the city was completely booked; I walked into the Days Inn at Hermannplatz… they had one room left and I talked them down 50 Euros. That place was passable. Key trick: they usually give you two comforters - sleep under one and on top of the other. I managed to book the Leonardo Royal hotel near Alexanderplatz for two nights in a row - the only time I was able to stay in the same place for two nights running the the entire trip. During the week I used a combination of the hotel tonight app, kayak.com, hotels.com, and priceline to do all the booking. On Thursday I biked into Prenzlauerburg and ate a perfectly tasty quiche at Anna Blume’s cafe on one of my favorite street corners in Berlin. There is a dress shop right across the street that Allie found and has been cultivating. The work with their own fabric designs and sew all their stuff in the shop. It’s called Bonnie and Buttermilk, and the shop window is lovely.

After the week wrapped up, I was too tired to start a long journey, so I decided to spend an evening exploring Frederichschain, a rising center just across the Spree from Neukolln in old East Berlin. I booked at ‘hotel Almodovar’ - yes, devoted to the Spanish auteur, and biked over. The hotel is near a city block that is a park and anchors both the Friday night restaurant/cafe scene and the Saturday morning market. I partook of both. I’d say this part of Berlin is a bit more packed in than Prenzlauerberg… a bit younger, a bit less expensive, nice but still a bit rough. Saturday morning market was lovely. Most interesting: a stand that was an open charcoal grill selling nothing but mackerel - the whole fish grilled in a cage.

Energy level restored, I decided to travel to Oldenburg on Saturday. Oldenburg is the birthplace of my Muhlmeister antecedents, who crossed to America in 1900 when my grandfather was 2 years old.

I left my bike locked up at an S-bahn station, kind of hoping for the best…. it all worked out but I was kinda nervous. The Berlin Deutsche Bahn station is the largest train station in Europe. Inside, it looks like one big 3 dimensional maze of things at odd angles to each other. It took me a bit to figure out how to buy a ticket, eventually I did - 92 Euros, 3.5 hours. Along the section going to Hannover I sat opposite a woman who had settled in Berlin after emigrating from Israel. Her family were early kibbutzim, before the nation of Israel was formed after WWII. They own the largest shipping line in and out of Israel, and she is the first of all her family to not pursue this career. She is in the jewelry business. We talked about the oddities of German, American, and Israeli politics, the phenomena of Israeli ‘memory books’ that are all over the world and written in by Jewish trekkers that are traveling after their military service, a rite of passage for Israeli youth. She is married to a German, and we talked about how words like ‘perfect’ and ‘correct’ are so important in German, much less so in Hebrew.

The station in Oldenburg was celebrating its 100th birthday, so they had lots of pictures of the original ‘romantic’ station built in 1867, and the one started in 1911 and completed during WWI in 1916. I found a bike rental place right by the station, and for 3 euros, rented a bike for the rest of the day. Connectivity had definitely been iffy, so I looked for a spot I could get wired up and find a hotel. I ended up at ‘der schwann’, a pub right on the canal that used to go through the town. I had a pint, booked a hotel, and lingered looking at the boats, bikes, and walkers. Altogether lovely. I biked over and dumped my stuff at my hotel and took off through town.

Oldenburg had a city wall and a moat, and while they’ve filled in pieces to make a ring road, its still quite easy to imagine. There were really nice houses right outside the old town, and a lovely park. And a cat having a bath on the hood of a car looking like it owned the place. I only had the bike for a few hours… the rental place closed at 8 pm and was not open on Sunday, so I made the most of it. After circling the downtown and the parks, I headed out of town along a canal… lots of sheep, bugs, cows, and wide open flatness. I got the bike back just before 8 and walked into the old town.

I imagined that I crossed paths with at least a dozen people who bore a sharp resemblance to my grandfather at different points in his life. There was a kid on a bike that was much too big, a dapper young gent, a middle-aged guy, And all of them skinny with that particular nose, forehead, and hair line.

Oldenburg is delightful. It was almost untouched by the wars of the 20th century, so much of the housing stock and old city survive. The old city has been converted entirely into a thriving pedestrian shopping district. They do not even allow bicycles. I had dinner there - its only old in it's bones. McDonald's and Burger King have arrived here too… Nonetheless the narrow streets and the old buildings still carried a great deal of charm even though they housed Irish pubs, fast fashion shops, and the occasional German brasserie. Fewer people speak English here than in Berlin... I have to haul out my bumpy German, and I require a great deal of help from Google translate… but it works.

I’m on the DB train section from Bremen to Hannover on my way back and the weather still holds sparkling clean. This part of Germany is flat as a pancake, full of agriculture, and enormous 747 size windmills everywhere. Oddly, lots of fields of corn… very American.

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