day 14 - august 18th

today, monday, corinna and daniel both went to work, and i - a bit less paralyzed than on friday - borrowed corinna's bike to jaunt about the city on my own.
it was a perfect biking day, cool with a bit of rain which i totally missed. i cycled around prenzlauer allee, trying to get my bearings with the bike lanes and the bike, whose seat was too tall for me. i'm not particularly good at riding bikes too tall for me, mostly because i never learned how to stop by standing up forward off the seat - i always just put my foot down sideways. it turns out this is a good way to skin one's knee while in the middle of an intersection filled with bikes and cars and pedestrians and people waiting for the tram, germans who have known how to balance on a bike since they were 3, and haven't fallen since. anyway, i learned. so i rode over to a Berlin Wall exhibit in Mitte (can't find an online link to this), which was fascinating. the line was drawn right down the middle of the street, and ultimately the east germans razed all the buildings on their side to create a barrier zone, but they left the facades facing the west. i thought i'd taken pics of the info posters they have there while they build a permanent museum, but no luck. along the way i passed this neat little skate park (yes, that bench is bolted in position)



with rules, of course.

then i went back to the tacheles to take better photos! here's the main entranceway from the street, just an open archway with these stairs going up


the stairwell above the 2nd floor
this really is a cinema with a little bar; we stopped in at night when it was open

and three ratsi rode back down to the spree, and then along it all the way west out of town, through the government buildings again, and then back via the tiergarten, where they have built in ping pong!

it was just a real pleasure to ride in the city with such ease. and then through the brandenburg gate, and up unter den linden, which is a pretty, tree-covered wide promenade. i wanted to go see the I.M. Pei gallery at the Deutsches Historiches Muzeum, but wasn't in the mood when i got there. i was in the mood to buy a little souvenir for myself, a cute (and WAY overpriced) amplemann bag. i thought this would mark me as a tourist, but i got asked directions several times in the next day and a half while wearing it. me, with corinna and her complementary bag:


we ate dinner in, which was a nice switch from restaurants, and corinna & daniel introduced me to the beck's green lemon, which is half lemonade. who knew you could do these fun things with beer? (a bit of a spoiler: you don't need to add lemonade to czech beer to make it taste good.)