Berlin is an amazing city. It’s incredibly huge, and I would need weeks just to see the major points of interest. But it has such an amazing and simple transit system that gets you as far away as Potsdam without requiring any brain power that it’s not overwhelming. We stayed at a place called Art Hotel, which was quite decent.

Like my odd and somewhat obsessive interest in France’s market’s, the Berlin transit system will likely be one of my strongest impressions. I was reminded of first getting to Boston, being completely scared of a big new city, and realizing very quickly that it was mine for exploring courtesy of this well thought out mode of transport. (OK seriously what is it with the furry obsession, Germany?)

The boys here are just as outrageously cute as in Munich and Dresden. To be in any random place, like the u-bahn, or a street corner, or standing in line for tickets and to see handfuls of people who you want to have a 1-hour long term relationship with (sometimes at the same time) is an odd experience. I spent hours marveling at people, and Roy would nudge me to point someone else out and I would realize my receptors were worn out. We came up with a phrase which was some variant of “There needs to be an off switch for the boys now” when we were too tired to even smile, but they kept coming like a tsunami.

We saw walkinfukkin

Standinfukkin

Multibikkenfukkin

Skatinfukkin

Andy Warhol

And gaggles of others and different variants.

Berlin is getting a facelift right now, courtesy of Adidas, Hyundai, and hundreds of other sponsors of the FIFA World Cup. Everywhere we went there were signs of massive new construction and ‘improvements’. Roy wandered around saying “that’s new, that’s new, that’s new, that entire block is new” from the last time he was here.

The Brandenberg gate seemed like a likely place to start. There we found a Starbucks, and a huge steel sculpture of a football being erected.

We also wandered to the Reichstag to see machine gun bullet holes. Those had been patched, and there was some sort of Adidas arena construction in front.

It’s a good thing I am a HUGE HUGE soccer fan, otherwise I might find all this irritating.

I kept my time in Berlin relatively unstructured. I was kinda overwhelmed generally with being away from home for so long, and didn’t want to go crazy with travel agendas.

I got a great tip in my travel guide that if we wanted to avoid the lines at the Reichstag (which were huge), we could book lunch in the restaurant at the top. Which we did. We slipped right past the entire crowd and had a nice lunch before wandering around to see the Berlin skyline. On our way out it started raining hard, and naturally we forgot an umbrella
The rain didn’t stick around long so we just kept wandering. Next up we wandered over to the Stasi headquarters - the state secret police.

Finally we headed to the Deutsches Theatre where we saw Volpone by Ben Johnson - in German. I brought Roy a copy of the english play so he could get a feel for it, and he kindly gave me the Cliff’s notes version (which was sadly unavailable. I looked.) The storyline is detailed and silly: A rich man has lots of greedy pseudo-friends who want his inheritance. He pretends to be sick and dying or dead or none of those at various times to fuck with them. Seemed like it was acted very well, but as it was in German, had been widely reinterpreted, and had many parts and characters cut out I only had a small idea of what was going on.

After the theatre we stopped at an italian restaurant to grab something to eat. I ordered a steak with roquefort and discovered that my tastebuds were starting to go. Boo.

Home and bed after that.