Berlin

While I can't say I have any idea what the Berlin Mark Hotel costs, and can thus offer only a qualified recommendation for the budget traveler, there is much to recommend the breakfast spread.  Any place that has brie at breakfast has already won my heart.  I'm not much of a breakfast person.  I mean, I eat breakfast, but generally I'd happily dispense with omelets and go straight for the lasagna.  So breakfast was great.  Coffee, brie, dried fruits, salami.  Brilliant.

First mission of the day was to buy food for Christmas dinner.  In Germany, Christmas Eve is a bigger holiday than Christmas Day, so stores close early in the afternoon.  We walked over to KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens), a department store that has to be seen to be believed.  I have to give my dad credit for the research on this one.  We took an elevator to the top story and came out in the most amazing grocery store I've ever seen.  This is one to trounce Cold Storage in Singapore and outclass, if not outstock, Jungle Jim's in Cincinnati.

The seafood section was what amazed me most.  The were tanks full of fish that could be killed and gutted to order.  A refrigerated cabinet held more varieties of smoked salmon than I've ever seen in one place (got some of that for Christmas dinner).  While Dad picked out salads at the immense salad counter (he got an excellent tomato and cucumber salad, among others), he sent me on a mission to buy the strangest mustard I could find in the (I kid you not) mustard section.  I picked up a bottle of violet mustard, and a bottle each of pureed artichoke hearts and pureed green olives.  Cosine and Shorty were picking out breads.  I went to get some meats; then Dad and I went to the cheese section to select cheeses.  Interesting thing about this place: you pay for all your food in the section where you select it, so by the end I can only guess how many receipts we had in our pockets.  At last Cosine and I went to the confections section to pick out truffles for dessert.

After the food shopping, we started a wild goose chase for paper plates and plastic utensils.  KaDeWe's motto is something like, "If we don't have it, it probably doesn't exist," so we knew paper plates had to be somewhere.  Three floors later we found them near the greeting cards.  Cosine and I were all set out on picking out something horrifically tacky before Dad decided that our Christmas table ought to look as respectable as we could manage, so we ended up with plates that matched the plastic forks, and got paper napkins with the EU flag on them.  Cosine and I did manage to make one surreptitious purchase, a bag of animal shaped balloons.  We hadn't quite decided what we were going to do with them, but since our Christmas in Germany two years before had involved a tropical houseplant substituting for a Christmas tree, we were sure that our Christmas dinner needed some kind of trashy flair.

You must understand something about my family.  We listen to NPR.  We read weighty books.  We discuss Significant Issues.  One year on a camping trip in Wisconsin, we had NPR on while Dad was making breakfast in the morning, and Bob Edwards happened to mention that the grand opening of Mall of America in Minneapolis was that day.  The instant consensus was that we had to go (being the family we are, we drove 120 miles and bought nothing except food and a New York Times).

This is why Christmas would not be complete without balloon animals.

Dad, Shorty, and Cosine all had some last minute Christmas shopping to take care of.  Dad and Shorty stayed at KaDeWe, while Cosine and I went back out to seek a slightly less upscale place.  Walking by the plaza in front of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche, a church destroyed during the war whose bombed-out shell stands next to the modern octagonal church that replaced it, I spotted a gluhwein stand in the Christmas market.  Gluhwein is hot spiced wine that my brother loathes and I enjoy.  When it's served at Christmas markets, where it's as ubiquitous as hot cocoa would be at such an event in the States, it's usually served in a mug identifying the market and the city.  The price of the mug is included in the cost of the gluhwein, but you can return the mug for a refund, or keep it.  On our trip to Germany two years earlier, I thoughtlessly started collecting the mugs as we moved from town to town--they were cheap, practical souvenirs, and they saved me the bother of souvenir shopping, which I loathe, while also saving me from the regret of having nothing to remember the trip by.
 
 

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche

So naturally I went over and ordered a cup of gluhwein.  Cosine, who lived in Germany for a year and thus speaks excellent German, had to intercede because of some confusion I still don't understand.  But I got my mug, and my wine.

Whereupon I immediately slipped on the ice and fell on my ass.  Hot red wine flew everywhere, miraculously avoiding any material it could stain.  The mug survived intact.

Cosine helped me up.  My thigh felt like it was bruised.  In the cold, the wine on my hands was rapidly congealing into sticky ice.  The mug was stuck to my fingers.  I examined it.  The damn mug didn't even say anything about being from a particular Christmas market; it just said "Gluhwein."  This was hardly the souvenir I wanted to suffer this level of martyrdom for.

"I think I'll just go back to the hotel and clean up," I said, as we vacated the scene as quickly as possible, leaving a patch of ice that looked like a smashed raspberry snow cone behind.  "Good luck shopping."

Dad, Shorty, and Cosine all got back to the hotel a couple hours later.  We must have had lunch, but I don' t have the faintest memory of it, so I'm assuming it was mediocre.  After some brief deliberations, we headed for Potsdammerplatz, the center of Berlin before the divide, and slowly becoming so again.  More than a decade after reunification, Berlin is still putting
itself back together.  That, along with the more recent reestablishment of Berlin as the capital of a united Germany, easily makes Potsdammerplatz the place where I've had the most construction cranes within my field of vision at once, though Cosine reports it's not nearly the construction site it used to be.  Exiting the subway station, we saw one completed building, housing Deutsche Bahn offices, with a Toys R Us soon to be opening at its base.
 
 

Coming soon: the Canadian Embassy.  For now, an Eddie Bauer billboard is attached to the wall.

On Christmas Eve, of course, everything was deserted.  Cars passed by occasionally, but mostly it was just us, the crunch of our boots in the snow, and the silent construction sites.  A construction site identified itself as the future home of the Canadian embassy.  On the fence surrounding it hung tourist posters for New York and Iceland.  Nearby, a hot air balloon rested
on the ground deflating.

While it was no wrapped Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, which was undergoing renovations, was covered in thick plastic sheeting with a picture of the gate together with Christmas candles and the Deutsche Telekom logo on it.  In the empty plaza in front of the Reichstag, a Christmas tree stood in the cold.  Satisfied with our wanderings and chilled, we stood at a bus stop near the Reichstag and waited for the 100 bus.  The 100 is a bus route designed for tourists; it hits most of the major tourist sites in Berlin, and happened to be the most direct way to get from the Reichstag back to our hotel.
 

Not quite Christo: the Brandenburg Gate.

We got off the bus at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche, and examined the schedule of services; we decided to come here for midnight mass tonight.

Back at the hotel, we found chocolate rabbits on our beds.  Dad provided wrapping paper, and Cosine and I spent about an hour trying to get our gifts in presentable shape before tackling the balloon animals. The animals were largely unidentifieable.  One was definitely a rabbit, and one was a sparrow or some other sort of bird.  There was a snake we couldn't get to inflate, a sort of archetypal proto-insect, and something that we couldn't make any sort of guess at.  We went down the hall bearing gifts and balloons.

Dad and Shorty greeted us with surprise.

"Animals for the manger," I explained.

We arranged the gifts and the animals around the tiny Christmas tree Dad had picked up somewhere.  The insect was slowly deflating.  Christmas dinner was good, though Dad wasn't precisely thrilled by the violet mustard.  There was plenty left over--there's still some in my fridge.  I thought it was pretty all right, actually, although it's got a slightly bitter flavor that I guess must be from the crushed violet petals.  Good for a sandwich anyway.
 

Our Christmas tree.

After opening gifts, we all collapsed on the bed for a while before venturing back into the cold for church.  Dad and I are the only religious ones in the family, but two years earlier we all had a great time at midnight mass at the Dom in Munich.  The Cardinal processed toward the altar profligately blessing all in his path with his little not-quite-pope wave (do American Cardinals do this?).  The music was good, the congregation was entertaining (Germans are plainly not a churchgoing people--no one knew what was going on), and a good time was had by all.

None of us had even considered the possibility that the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche was Lutheran.  On the plus side, this meant that we were permitted to take communion.  On the minus side, it wasn't altogether clear that any of the maybe 800 people in church were had a pulse.

The interior of the modern church is surprisingly attractive.  The building is octagonal, built with blue-tinted glass bricks.  The ceilings are high, the floors dark.  The light from the street outside filtered through the bricks gave the air a blue glow.  The altar is prominently situated at the front, elevated above the rest of the church by a few steps.  The place has the potential to be a very effective liturgical space.

We barely noticed the procession: the minister and a deacon walked down the aisle in silence.  Everyone remained seated.  There was a song.  A few people sang.  There were readings.  People sat.  Another song that no one really sang.  The Gospel.

The sermon.  I understood that she was saying something about "that Holy Night," but otherwise got nothing out of it.  Cosine, the only one of us who could understand it, said it had something to do with "star people."

"UFOs?" I asked.

"I think it had something to do with the shepherds, or maybe the kings," Cosine said.  "But anyway, we're supposed to be them."

"Star people?"

"Yeah."

After the sermon came the peace.  In our section of the church, people shifted uncomfortably in their seats and avoided looking at each other.

"Well, someone has to start it," an older gentleman said (as translated by Dad), and started shaking hands.  It was all over very quickly.

The minister instructed us that we were to stand during the consecration.  Dad and I went forward for communion.  I almost didn't, but decided that Christmas was not the best time to get judgmental about liturgy.  Out of habit I crossed myself after receiving the wine.  I worried that, though as an Anglican I'm technically Protestant, someone might try to nail the 95 theses to my forehead, but figured that no one here was passionate enough to bother.

After the lightning-quick recessional, we joined the crowd and went outside.

"Let's go to a Catholic church next time," I said.

Unanimous consent.

Next--December 25: The diminishing tragedy of dead babies.