day 16 - august 20th

today i traveled from berlin to prague, after a nice breakfast at home with daniel. the berlin train station is beautiful and so easy to navigate and buy tickets:
i had just enough time to go up to the platforms and back down again before my train arrived. the ride itself was very pretty - not quite long enough for me to read my whole czech travel book which i'd not opened yet, and definitely not long enough for me to meaningfully learn any czech, but mostly, and lots of pretty scenery. we went mostly along small towns and a river. another study in the new/old contrast:

and i didn't yet know how much of this beautiful farmland i'd see in the next week or so:

the main train station at prague is under construction, so all trains are arriving at holesovice, which is a bit north of the city and across the river. the station is definitely not set up as the main station, with just one little tourist office and one little tabac, but luckily i had the inside scoop from marek on what subway to get to his house. i was in early, so i walked from the train station (very confusing roads!) and explored a little. i found this beautiful building
yes, that's a spiral staircase going up the middle! the building feels like a deserted fairgrounds, and i think is where the actual charles bridge statues are on display (as opposed to the fake replicas they have out on the bridge now). there was a nice little park here, with good maps so i could start to orient myself, and i made my way towards downtown. i was definitely out of the tourist sphere here, and it was really nice to be able to approach the city on foot and see its skyline. this is a terrible picture, but it gives you an idea. the city center

and the castle acrss from it


another study in contrasts: here's the prague bike line (actually, i do mean that in the singular, as it was the only one i saw):

i walked around the city a bit. sherry, this one's for you:
and visited the obligatory wenceslas square
where i was lucky enough to come across this amazing display of photos. it turned out i was visiting on the 40th anniversary of the soviet takeover of the city, when they crushed the prague spring of 1968 with tanks and soldiers, leaving 59 dead in the city. this display was photos of protest posters that went up (and usually back down within an hour). some excellent ones here; i wish i had pictures of more of them:

in case you can't read the caption on this one, it says "Radio Vltava announces: we are witnessing how our citizens and the Russian soldiers are embracing".

the city itself is beautiful. i'd never been somewhere with such amazing architectural details, and i loved the city squares (pics of those later) and the curved streets and buildings:
then, on the subway, which made me realize that maybe it's not just the germans who can do mass transit, that maybe it's just new yorkers who make it complicated to tourists, managed to exit the station going the wrong way, and found my google maps of the neighborhood - which had no street names - totally useless. i managed to scrape together three words (kde je spitalska, where is spitalska) for a pair of women with babies in strollers, who said, do you speak english? yes. one of them walked me to my destination, out of her way; she immigrated from russia 5 years ago and likes prague a lot, and has never been to the u.s. anyway, marek made me pasta dinner, and i planned my route for the next day, and then he took me out to a fantastic little local pub for good cheap beer, the sort of pub i probably could never go in as a woman tourist (or even a tourist at all, maybe) but was great to experience - bright lights, old men watching football, heavy tables and benches. marek explained to me that pubs usually only have 1 thing on tap, because you can only really keep one tap tasting good at a time. explains a lot.

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:

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.)

[in medias res] this one's for andrew: kulturbrauerei

a huge - city block? - old brewery now turned into a cultural center with cinema, clubs, restaurants, and even a supermarket (!). http://www.kulturbrauerei.de/

[in medias res] Schloß Charlottenburg

[in medias res] boat tour of the landwerkanal

the pretty little famous bridge whose name i don't know, the raisin bomber, and some ugly ducklings.

day 13 - august 17th

today corinna and I went out touristing again, first taking another great boat tour along the landwehrkanal, which is a very pretty narrow canal right through the middle of town, which is excellent because it provides parkfront and waterfront for many many neighborhoods. berlin also has lots of really neat buildings, and makes very cool architectural choices about incorporating the old with the new. (I have no idea what these buildings are; the tour was in german and corinna said it was mostly boring.)

some of the old buildings have super cool details, too. one of the things I liked best about the city was all the neat design details just for the sake of design. I don’t think we do that in the US – form and efficiency often trumps artistic sensibilities

you can also see the amazing clouds following us on the boat. we sat out at least two downpours on the deck, which was nice because I got a better view without all the other people!

there were lots of things to make the city nice and to make the canal accessible all the way along. I saw these cut out stairs going down into ports or canals all over, and in the Czech republic, maybe a carryover from when access to the water was necessary.

here’s a side bit of the canal, where houseboats are parked.

and public park and bike paths all along: and the ubiquitous “beach” bar where you can sip your beer in the sand

classic berlin:

and berlin had amazing graffiti. here’s a bit of the still-standing wall, where artists are encouraged:

and another shot, taken the next day from the bridge

now we’re getting into kreuzberg, a neat neighborhood with lots of Turkish immigrants and a very punk feel.

i saw these head-cut-off fish (sharks?) all over the city - would like to know what their story is.

the canal took us past the museum of (technology? something like that), which has an American plane hanging outside, the “raisin bomber”.

I never knew the story of how the Americans dropped food to the west Berliners when they were cut off from the rest of the west. they seemed to think it was a good thing, even though we were forcing germans to eat American chocolate. go figure. after the boat, we walked to charlottenburg castle, which was my first german castle and very very pretty. another picture here.

Sunday night we had reservations at a “dunkel-restaurant” where everything was dark dark dark, and you ordered by meal: beef, pork, poultry, or vegetarian, and then they served you 4 courses. we went to the unsicht-bar, which purports to be the first of the kind, and which boasts blind servers. (that’s an interesting issue in itself … ) anyway, it was a bit overpriced, but very fun, and not nearly as hard as it sounds to navigate your table, and the food was very good. Daniel and i both wondered whether it would be a good place for a date – maybe not a first date, but an early one. I kind of think so. Corinna didn't.