Checkpoint Charlie

Berlin may not be the most beautiful city in the world, but it certainly is a fascinating one.

Today we took ourselves to the very touristy Checkpoint Charlie and to the Mauermuseum which is just next door.

Even though Checkpoint Charlie is a bit campy now, with fake border-guards who charge you 2 euros to take their picture, it was pretty amazing to stand there drinking coffee and snapping photos happily in a place that at one point must have been absolutely terrifying for so many people.

Even more amazing to stand on this arbitrary spot and imagine that up until 20 years ago, it wasn't possible to even wander from one side of the street to the other.

The Mauermuseum was a bit arbitrary in its design and layout, but it had a fascinating array of photos and stories of uprisings, and failed and successful escape attempts. Some of these stories of human bravery, ingenuity, and desperation were just beyond imagining. To see photos of people escaping curled up under car engines, hiding in suitcases, jumping out of buildings, running through barbed wire, or sliding between buildings in home-made harnesses was just incredible. So difficult to be in this city as it is now and imagine how it used to be.

Later in the afternoon, we went for a walk in former East Berlin along Frankfurter Allee and Karl-Marx Allee. The difference in the architecture between East and West Berlin is marked. Both sides of the city had major rebuilding to do after the war, and the west side has its share of big, and not so attractive block buildings, which must have been cheap and fast to put up.

East Berlin has buildings and streets that are on an entirely different scale. There are information placards up along Karl Marx Allee, and we learned some pretty interesting facts. The beginning of Karl Marx Allee, which was originally named for Stalin, is a very wide boulevard with massive buildings running all along it. Nowhere that we've seen in the West has streets this wide or buildings so big.

The two towered structures that you can see here were meant, according to one quotation on the placard, to be an impressive and imposing first view of the first socialist boulevard. That's not an exact quote, but it's very close.

What really struck us as we walked along was the size of the buildings, the uniformity and, for lack of a more descriptive word, the ugliness of them. Apparently, the architects and planners of these buildings we sent to "study" in The Soviet Union, and there was a great photo on another one of these placards, showing a street in Moscow which looks exactly like where we were standing in Berlin.

The more we thought about these buildings, the more it made sense. These buildings are large, imposing, and personality-less. The regime wouldn't have wanted a city full of beautiful buildings. There should be no appearance of luxury, of individuality or creativity in its people so why should there be any in its architecture? The last thing they would have wanted was people looking at a beautiful building and feeling inspired, or creative, or moved to have their own thoughts, feelings, imagination or creativity.

There is a certain grittiness to this city, and its people seem to us to be a bit gritty as well, though not in an unfriendly way. There is a difficult history here that is still very real, and it seems to me that its people live with it on a daily basis, even if they are not consciously thinking about it.

Looking forward to the next few days and exploring even more.

Spider Hotel

Yesterday, Steve and I left Norway on the long drive to Berlin.

I have to say, Steve was such a champ in the car.

He got in the zone, and he just kept driving and driving. He drove a marathon 12 hours, through Norway, Sweden, the ferry to Denmark and then another 80 miles to departure point of the ferry from Denmark to Germany.

The weather, of course, was dismal: rainy and incredibly windy.

We wound up in the town of Rodby, Denmark, which was where we would catch the Denmark to Germany ferry the next morning.

We stayed in what I believe is fair to call the worst hotel in Denmark. No, in Scandanavia. This place looked like something out of The Twilight Zone, where when you enter your room you are immediately transported back to 1950.

I seriously have never seen anything quite like it: completely worn carpets and furniture and windows that looked like they had not been washed since the hotel was built.

What saved it for me was the fact that it was very clean. Because I can handle furniture from 1950, but dirt from 1950 I can do without.

The ceilings were that kind of weird corrugated metal with the millions of tiny holes in it.

As we prepared for bed we discovered that the underside of that ceiling was home to spiders. Lots and lots of spiders.

Big ones. Kind of like Daddy Long Legs, but bigger, heftier. They would crawl along the walls, or drop down on one thin web-strand from the ceiling and make their way to the floor. We killed about 5 of them, and then got in bed to read.

Steve, being exhausted, turned his light out ahead of me, and I used my little book light to read a bit longer. When I was finished reading, I did a little sweep of the room with my light to check for spiders.

There was a mosquito on the wall right behind me, and from the ceiling was hanging yet another spider, who was happily webbing its way down directly toward my pillow. As soon as my light swept over it, the spider started beating a hasty retreat back up its thread toward the ceiling, but that was it for me. There was no way I was going to go to sleep any time soon.

I just knew that as soon as my light was off, that spider was going to resume its downward journey to my pillow where it would then crawl over my face and lay eggs in my ear.

I pulled the desk chair as far away from the bed as I could so as not to disturb Steve, and I watched Back to the Future and Gilmore Girls on my laptop until 4am by which time I was so tired I couldn't remain upright and finally got in bed and fell asleep.

The advantage of Steve doing so much driving yesterday was that today we had an hour-long ferry ride followed by only about 3 1/2 hours of driving to get to Berlin.

We are staying at a terrific hotel called Louisa's Place on the Kurfurstendamm in the Charlottenburg area. We chose this hotel because it is actually apartments more than hotel rooms, and they kindly upgraded us to a huge three-room suite with bedroom, living room/kitchen and office.

Kurfurstendamm is a long street famous for its array of high-end shops. We took a stroll down it, arriving at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche (Emperor William Memorial Church). What you can see in this picture is all that is left: the tower of a once beautiful church which was bombed out during the war.

We also took the train to Potsdamer Platz and had a bit of a wander around there.

To celebrate our arrival in Berlin we sampled what is apparently a local institution: the currywurst. This is a sausage which is sliced up, sprinkled with curry powder and doused in a sauce which is kind of like HP Sauce mixed with BBQ sauce.

It was yummy, though the curry flavor was not as strong as I thought it would be.

So far, we are really enjoying Berlin, and are looking forward to spending the next few days here.

If anybody has any suggestions of places to go, eat, etc. please share!

Norway Final Day

Our last day in Norway.

We went for a drive to see the Voringsfossen Waterfall, which was pretty beautiful.

I think, however, we are ready to leave Norway now. It is so empty everywhere, and I think we have gotten, dare I say it, a bit saturated with the Norway scenery, as beautiful as it is.

I find it sort of amazing, the way the human brain seems to need differing stimuli so frequently: too much city, needs quiet beauty; too much of the same mountains and fjords, needs something different yet again.

Well our brains are certainly going to get something different, as we are heading to Berlin. I know we sort of swore off cities before, but we are going to give it a go anyway. If it turns out to be a mistake, we can head somewhere else.

Berlin seems like it will be a fascinating place. Steve was there many moons again, right as The Wall was coming down, so I imagine it will be amazing for him to see the differences.

Plus I have been reading so many Len Deighton books over the past few years, I feel that I already know the myself!

In addition to being our last day in Norway, today also marks 11 weeks since we left San Francisco.

Eleven weeks, I cannot believe it has been that long. It feels both like the time has flown by and gone at a snail's pace at the same time, if that is possible.

Thus far it has definitely been challenging: getting sick so often was obviously hard, but there have been other challenges that I didn't exactly expect.

Just filling days can sometimes be difficult, and having to figure out where to go next and where to stay has also been harder than I thought it would be.

Hardest of all I think, has been being without friends for so long. I thought we might meet more people along the way, but apart from our friends' wedding in England in June, the one couple we met while kayaking the Geirangerfjord, and the weekend we spent in Paris with Paul and Christen, we haven't had anyone else to talk to or go out with.

When was the last time you spent 11 weeks, 24/7 with your spouse in, for the most part, small spaces, with hardly any time to yourself or with other people?

It can be difficult at times, and a bit confusing, because sometimes I think we want desperately to just get away from each other, and yet we also know that, for this time, we're kind of all we have!

I think if we can make it through this trip and still want to spend time with each other after, then we can make it through anything!

Next post...from Berlin.