East Side Gallery

As of yesterday, I am in possession of a super-short Berliner hairdo. Think Mike Myers as Dieter from Sprokets on Saturday Night Live ("Now's ze time on Sprokets ven ve danse"), only curly.

I kind of like it this short, but it will take some getting used to.

After my shearing, we took ourselves to the East Side Gallery, which is the longest (1.3km) and best-preserved remaining section of The Berlin Wall. In 1990, dozens of artists from around the world created over 100 murals along this stretch of wall, making it, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook, the world's largest open-air art gallery.

It's pretty impressive to actually be looking at a section of the wall itself, and very moving to see all of the different artistic creations inspired by it.

After that, it was off to dinner at a terrific restaurant, Schwarzwaldstuben, for what else.......Schnitzel!!!

Tomorrow we are off to Prague for four nights, followed by one night in Munich as we make our way down to Lake Como, Italy, where we will stay for two weeks.

I am not sure what the internet deal will be in Prague, but I do know that our apartment in Italy doesn't have internet, so we will have to go to an internet cafe in the town 10 minutes away.

All that is to say that I'm not sure how often I will be able to post over the next few weeks. I will do so as often as I can, so keep checking back periodically.

Ciao!

More KaDeWe Food Hall Photos

Cheese!!!

Parma Ham.

Salami Extravaganza!

mmmm.........chocolate....

I can't believe I ate the WHOLE thing...

KaDeWe Food Hall

Spent a fantastic few hours yesterday at the KaDeWe Department Store Food Hall. This place is unbelievable. I have never seen such a huge selection of foodstuffs in one place before. The array of items on offer and the variety was just staggering. I think I started hyperventilating a little with sheer joy at being surrounded by so much wonderful food!

Cases upon cases of sausages, dried and cured meats, fresh meat and poultry of all kinds, cheeses, breads, smoked fish, pastries, seafood, chocolates, candies, honeys, jellies, condiments, spices, caviars, pates, foie gras, fruits and vegetables.

Not only were there items to buy and bring home, there were also an endless variety of counters at which to have a hot or cold meal, coffee, sparkling wine, etc.

Here was our lunch. I had a beef bratwurst with sauerkraut, mustard, and of course, a beer! The brat was delicious, and the sauerkraut was the best I've ever had. Served warm, it had been cooked with tiny bits of ham and the perfect amount of vinegar. It was a reflux disaster, but boy, was it worth it.

I have been to Harrod's food hall before, and it is also a spectacular place. What set this KaDeWe food hall apart from somewhere like Harrod's was the affordability of everything. Unlike at Harrod's where you have to take out a second mortgage on your house to buy a loaf of bread, everything we saw yesterday was beyond reasonably priced. It's the food hall for normal people. Our lunch cost us about $20, for two meals and two beers.

After lunch we walked miles, around two very cool neighborhoods: Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte-Scheunenviertel. Prenzlauer is kind of like Park Slope lite. It was one of the first neighborhoods to be re-vamped after the wall came down, and it has a lot of very cool looking buildings, pretty parks and amazing cafes and restaurants.

The one thing that made me feel a bit depressed along our wanderings was the fact that every Jewish-themed building we passed: a synagogue, the Jewish Center, Jewish Museum, Jewish memorial, etc. was surrounded by barricades and fronted by armed guards.

I don't know if there is still a big problem with anti-semitism in Berlin in particular or if they are just showing an abundance of caution, but it was a bit hard to see. The more things change...

Train Tickets and Other Random Thoughts

I forgot to mention yesterday the oddity of Berlin's subway system:

Ticket-buying seems to be entirely on the honor system. There are no turnstiles for which one needs tickets to get in and out of the station, and, from what I have seen, no conductor who walks up and down checking tickets.

Tickets are purchased from a self-service kiosk on the platform and validated at a little machine nearby, and that's it. So far, we could easily not have paid for any of our train journeys. Unless I am missing some very secret way they have of knowing whether or not people have bought tickets, no one need ever pay.

But people do. In fact, everybody seems to. It's kind of incredible. I was trying to imagine what would happen if they took away all of the turnstiles in the NYC subway, and just left it up to people to buy tickets anyway. I'm sorry, but no one would ever buy a subway ticket again!

While I'm at it, a few random observations about our trip in general thus far: one of the things I have noticed and really liked is that the places we have been in Europe seem so much less fame and celebrity obsessed than in the US (this is not quite so true for England with all its tabloids).

One is not constantly being bombarded with stories and photos of Brittany Spears or Heidi Speigel and her ever-increasing ratio of silicone to actual flesh.

There also seems to not be quite the same obsession with wealth and outward symbols of it like flashy cars, massive houses and overly made-up and altered women wearing insanely expensive clothes.

I must say, it is really nice to not always be confronted with what one is not, or with what one doesn't have, which I can often feel is the case in California.

Part of that could be that I just am not watching television, so I'm not getting bombarded with certain stories or images, but there is also definitely a difference in what I see on the street and in the people around me. I haven't found myself looking around at other women in any of the places we've been and feeling fat, or old, or underdressed or under made-up, and that has been such a nice feeling.

The part about not watching television is, I think, a significant one. I do tend to watch a lot of television when I am at home: taping TV shows that I like and watching them, or getting things from Netflix. But there is definitely a link for me between watching television and feeling depressed and inadequate.

Everybody on TV of course, is thin and beautiful and young, for the most part (the women, at least), and not only am I reminded that I am not thin or young, but I am also reminded that these women are extremely well-paid actresses who are getting to do what I dreamed of doing but was not able to. This adds another layer of depression. And what does depression make people do? That's right....eat. And then the depression increases because not only am I not a skinny actress on a television show, but I am a rapidly-expanding, face-stuffing lady who's not on a TV show!

It is amazing how nice it has been not watching any television. I have watched a few DVDs that I brought along on my laptop, but that's it. Instead, we have both been reading voraciously. I used to do this when I was younger, read for hours at a time, getting completely lost in a book, but it has been a long time since I've done that. So far on this trip I have read 12 books and I have just begun number 13. That's a lot of books!! I will include my reading list in another blog.

The result of all this no-tv-watching (plus being sick those times) has been weight loss. Hooray! I think I have finally lost all the weight I gained while on the anti-anxiety meds. I don't know how much weight I've actually lost because there are no scales anywhere, but my clothes are definitely loose.

Last observation: I have not been carsick once since arriving in Europe. Not once, and we have been on some pretty windy roads, roads that certainly would have made me sick in the US. The only thing I can put it to is that the European cars are designed with a completely different style of handling than the US cars.

The thing that makes me sick on very windy roads is that wallow that seems to happen after turning a corner. I don't know if you know what I mean, but normally, on a windy road, the car makes the turn, and when coming out of the turn there is that kind of wallow, or sudden sway back out of the curve. It is that sway that leaves me feeling sick.

In the European cars, there seems to be no wallow out of a turn at all. It doesn't seem to matter who is driving, since I get sick all the time when Steve drives on windy roads in the US, and I have to have him pull over so I can drive. But here, Steve has been driving the whole time, and I haven't felt sick once.

It also doesn't seem to depend on the car. Since arriving in Europe we I have been a passenger in our friend's Range Rover, our rented Ford Fiesta, Steve's father's car, and now our Peugeot. All of these cars took me on windy roads and yet in none of these cars did I feel sick. How can this be?

Any ideas??

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.