day 15 - august 19th

today i rode down through the eastern & southern sections of town, first way out to friedrichshain to see karl marx allee and the old communist apartment buildings. they make a pretty & grand avenue, i think, but in a way that forces all life out of the neighborhood - they're just a more compact version of our modern suburban subdivisions that segregate homes from businesses (yep, i'm reading jane jacobs).
and yes, that's a bike lane separated by rails from BOTH pedestrians and cars. i actually missed a turn and ended up biking maybe 5 km outside town, which i continued because it was amazing to me how far the bike infrastructure went. i could actually get all the way to the big box stores in a designated bike lane! i also was glad i went this far out because i got to take a picture - all the other bike lanes were active roadways so i couldn't have stopped to get these shots. all the bike lanes are paved in red, and cars and peds know to yield. and see how this divides into 2 lanes?


yep, separate bike signals, with a protected left turn.
then i rode through kruezberg, a funky part of town with lots of turkish immigrants, and sat at the parks along the river, and saw this neat boat

and from the red bridge, the statue of 2 men in the middle of the river
and just above the bridge on the kruezberg side, this

i went to a neigbhorhood full of antique sellers with their tables out on the sidewalks all afternoon, very busy with people and restaurants, and then to a very small but very steep little park with an artificial waterfall

and a nice view from the topi biked back via Judisches Museum where i was totally impressed with daniel libeskind's architechture. it was weird for me to take pics there; these images are from the wikipedia site, and i think they're pretty good but don't really capture the feel of the space. being inside the garden of exile made me seasick and the shalechet installation was just incredibly disturbing

then i hurried back to meet daniel & corinna at home, and realizing that my ATM card didn't work at any of the cash machines i could find - i have a mastercard, but all the ATMs only took the version that has a special logo. my bank online told me to try the volksbank, which worked!! - to the utter amazement and amusement of the berliners i told. this is, apparently, one of those class issues that remains opaque to outsiders.

we headed back out by car to the same neighborhood i'd been in all afternoon, and had excellent thai food where i completely embarrassed myself by not being able to speak numbers in german, and then had a drink where i tried a persimmon for the first time (i think!), and home exhausted.

my happy and generous hosts: