My Spanish Sabbatical, 2007/8
Daniel W. Koon
Hello again. Travelogue time. (Please check out http://it.stlawu.edu/~koon/MadridSabbaticalDiary/ for the archive of other trips we've taken this year.)
This time, for "Semana Santa", the week before Easter, we decided to head to Berlin, where I lived for a year before starting grad school (in West Berlin, back when that mattered). Taking a full week allowed us to rent a nice little apartment with a kitchen for less than what the hotel would run. So, unlike with our Christmas experience with Paris, we had good location and a cozy crashpad to come back to, with a place to store all "our" bread, cheese, sausage, beer, and other deli-cacies.
The first full day, we walked along Unter den Linden, once the Prussian "Miracle Mile", and later the GDR (East German) prestige boulevard. It's changed, of course, from when I used to visit: no need to go through customs, change money (neither of which we had to do, btw, to travel from Spain to Berlin), lots more people (tourists, mostly) on the streets, nobody harrasses you to [illegally] change money. And, of course, Starbucks at the edge of Pariser Platz, on the Eastern side of the Brandenburger Gate, that takes some getting used to. For me, passing under the Brandenburger Gate was a very moving experience. Not that that would have brought me from East to West 26 years ago, but I would have had to hurdle over barricades and probably dodge bullets.
We came back a few times over the week to the East. I especially enjoyed visiting the Museum Island, home to the Berlin cathedral, the Lustgarten (i.e. Pleasure Garden, see photo), the Pergamon and other world-class museums, housing the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, a reconstructed [huge] altar from Pergamon [Greek city in Asia Minor], and the famous bust of Queen Nefretiti. We visited several other museums, but skipped even more. The Jewish Museum was quite moving. There is a sculpture garden in a courtyard with assorted tilted concrete slabs that was meant to be very disorienting, to recall the experience of refugees in their new countries. In the Kennedy Museum, we watched a film of Kennedy's visit to the city in 1963 and his famous words "Ich bin ein Berliner", which (a) was well received partly because German + Mass. accent = Berlinerisch sounding, and (b) can be misunderstood as meaning "I am a jelly donut." (See picture below: "Eli ißt ein Berliner.")
Another wonderful site in the East was the Gendermenmarkt, too cold for the summer Biergardens, but we did visit Fassbender & Rausch, one of the greatest chocolate shops in the world, replete with chocolate recreations of the Brandenburger Gate, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Titanic, etc.
Potsdam. I'd never been to this Potsdam before, a sort of Prussian Versailles. Sadly, the first castle we visited had a several-hour waiting list and the second one we reached was closed for the day. Those of you in the North Country will appreciate that we have now visited (in the month of March alone), three of the namesakes of towns in our county back home -- Lisbon, Madrid (accent on first syllable in NY State), and Potsdam.
We happened upon a mostly a capella choral concert the Saturday before we left (Easter Saturday) in the modernistic church adjacent to the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm. Brahms, Mendelssohn, Distler, Bach and more. Also in the category of not-on-the-tourist-map, Judy found two sweet little yarn shops for starting her next knitting project, as well as two button stores (one closed by the time we found out about it, and the other a group of tables at the Tiergarten flea market.
Tomorrow back to the lab. Did a mostly good job of not sprinkling my German with Spanish words this past week. Let's see if I can switch gears and get back to my Germanless Spanish.
Happy Spring/Easter to one and all,
Daniel, Judy, and Eli
Welcome to Potsdam
The New Palais in Potsdam
Fassbender & Rausch Chocolatiers. No Eli did not bite that chunk out of the top of the Kaiser Wilhelm.
Lustgarten ("Pleasure Garden")
Eli isst ein Berliner. (Berlin is eating a Berliner (a jelly donut), not Eli is a Berliner.)
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