Berlin

"Look," Dad said at breakfast.  "They've changed the walk sign."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Dad and Cosine together explained the deal with the Walk/Don't Walk guys in Berlin.  In what may be the only piece of Stalinist whimsy anywhere, East Berlin had really cool Walk/Don't Walk guys (aka ampelmannchen).  After Berlin reunited, the city government slowly began replacing the Eastern ampelmannchen with their less idiosyncratic, more American Western counterparts.  The Easterners protested, successfully, to allow the ampelmannchen to remain intact.
 

Walk.	Don't Walk.

The Eastern walking guy wears a hat, and appears to be carrying some sort of tool.  He walks with purpose.  He is a comrade, an eager laborer, smiling in propoganda films as he swings his hammer to build the great socialist state.  The Eastern stopping guy wears a hat, too.  No mere hand, he has his arms outstretched, showing that he will use the full power of his body to stop you from crossing the street.  But should we read him as disciplinarian, the insignificant traffic cop so drunk with the little power he has that he would sooner wrestle you to the ground than let you jaywalk?  Or should we read those outstretched arms as tender, loving, and warm, the embrace of mother Stalin who would so hate for you to be so eager with your tool, your hat, your purposeful walk, that you get hit by a bus.

I fell in love with the ampelmannchen immediately.  As he generally does, Cosine thought I was crazy.

Venturing out, we took the subway to Alexanderplatz, home of the astonishingly ugly yet fascinating Fernsehturm, a television tower and great example of atrocious Soviet monumentalism, and the simply perplexing World Clock, which, as you walk around it, tells what time it is in every time zone in the world.  It is crowned with something that might be the solar system, or possibly an atom.
 

World clock.

To get a good look at Communist East Berlin, we took the subway on to Karl-Marx-Allee, formerly known as Josef-Stalin-Allee.  In this weather it was grey, drab, and square: everything one imagines East Berlin to be.  Never mind the fact that much of West Berlin is the same; building housing for 2,000,000 people after the nearly complete destruction of the city left little time for imagination on either side.  Still, East Berlin is unusually drab, probably because as West Berlin prospered, the buildings got more imaginative; there was one near our hotel that looked like it had wings.  But in the East it was all rectangles.

Berlin, incidentally, is as flat as Indianapolis.  When my parents visit me in Indy they seem to think this is a character failing on the part of my city.  They made no such judgments in Berlin.  The flatness of the city was immediately apparent on Karl-Marx-Allee.  The road and the buildings just seem to go on forever.  We walked for a few blocks; everthing looked the same.  We walked over one block, into a side street.  It was narrower, but filled with the same blocky buildings.  A set of dumpsters sat behind a fence.  A sign listed opening hours for the trash cans.  None of us really knew what to make of that.  As we reached the next subway station, I spotted a McDonald's on the ground floor of one of these vast square buildings.  What would Karl Marx have to say?
 

Off Karl-Marx-Allee.

This subway station had remarkably low ceilings.  Dad and I cleared them by little more than a foot.  Though it's tempting to chalk this one up to Communism, the more likely answer is age.  It's not a young subway system, and predates the division of the city.  Dad talked about how maintaining the subways as two separate operating entities during the division required an elaborate system of ghost stations, which had to have been eerie.

The train that picked us up here was strange, too.  It didn't have cars, it was just one, long flexible tube, like a snake.  Looking all the way down to the front you could see it move uphill slightly, or watch people disappear from sight as the train turned a corner.

When we got off, I paused to take a picture of some garbage cans (the same one that graces the front page of this travelog), earning me an exasperated sigh from Cosine.  We were by the river, a short distance from the Berliner Dom.  We paused on the way there to observe a statue of a boy with an armadillo and some fruit.  I have no idea what that was about.

The Berliner Dom is fantastic.

"We should've come here last night," I said to Dad.

"They're Lutheran," Dad said.

"Yeah, but still, this is the Dom.  They've got to put on some kind of show, right?"

"They're German Lutherans," Dad said.

Fair point.

The church is huge.  The main aisle is neatly bisected by the transept.  At either end of the transept are giant sarcophagi, for lack of a better word, containing the remains of the likes of Frederick the Great and their queens.  They are covered in gold leaf, and ornately carved with angels, lions, and swords.

On a run downstairs to the restroom, I found the crypt.  It took a little convincing to get everyone down there, but it was worthwhile.  Hundreds of caskets are placed around the room, almost all for people I'd never heard of.  Mostly ornate, some were festooned with military ribbons.  It was Shorty who found the most interesting set of three.  The first was a huge stone casket, nearly big enough for an adult, and elaborately carved.  It was the casket of a nobleman's newborn son.  Next to it was another casket, rather smaller, but still respectable, belonging to the same mans second newborn son.  The third was just perfunctory.  Another dead baby, another casket.  Clearly grief was getting expensive, so why bother with a show?

For lack of anything better to do, we decided to go to the top of the Fernsehturm, a short walk from the Dom.  Lonely Planet noted that the best thing about being at the top of it is that you can't see it.  On our way there, we stopped for lunch at a place called Kartoffelhaus #1.  "Potatoes," Cosine said.  We went in.

Potatoes are good things, though Shorty ordered stuffed tomatoes, which while untrue to the starchy spirit of the Kartoffelhaus, were also good.  My beer was terrible, though.  Outside, I took a picture of some telephones.

"Why are you taking a picture of phones?" Cosine said.

"They're interesting."

"They're telephones."
 

Fernsehturm with cranes.

We walked through a passageway under the street to get to the base of the Fernsehturm.  From there it was a short line to get tickets, then an elevator ride up to get to the globe at the top.  The observation deck does give you a great view of the city, though the low clouds and impending darkness made it hard to see much.  There was one sight really worth seeing, though.  In a building off Alexanderplatz below, maybe 15-20 stories high, a Keith-Haringish animated drama was playing out in the pattern of lights in the windows.  People danced, hearts beat, a camel walked across the building and, um, left its droppings in lights.  Stars exploded and water dripped from faucets.  So much for the Howard Johnson in Raleigh being impressive by using its balcony lights to form a cross at Christmas.

After descending we stayed for a while in the building at the base of the tower.  There was an exhibit of cartoons bemoaning or looking forward to the advent of the Euro.  From the gift shop, for 2 marks, I bought a strange Fernsehturm poster that Cosine thought was hideous.  It's all a matter of taste, I guess.  What I do know is that it cost me over 100 times what I paid for it to get it framed.

It was dark by the time we left.  At a bus stop, Dad pointed out a backlit poster depicting a woman with three breasts.  "More than meets the eye," the tagline read, according to Cosine.  Mediamarkt, the store it was advertising, is sort of a German version of Best Buy.  I'd like to see Best Buy try a similar campaign.

Instead of heading straight back to the hotel, we stopped at the Stadtoper box office.  La Boheme was playing the next night, and we managed to snag what were among the very last seats left.  On the way back to the subway station, we stopped to observe luxury sportscars in a store window.

Cosine and I took the subway back to the hotel.  Dad and Shorty took it one stop further to verify the existence of a laundromat.  While we were waiting, Cosine and I worked out our plans for after Berlin.  Dad and Shorty were headed to Lubeck; we decided to go to Koln (aka Cologne).

When Dad and Shorty got back, we all headed to the Internet cafe up the street.  Cosine and I needed to make reservations for the hostel in Koln, which you can do over the brilliant IBN system.  This Internet cafe has an amazing pricing system.  We walked past it a couple times every day, because it was on the way to the subway station from the hotel.  The price for an hour is based on the number of people in the store at any given time.  The more people, the more expensive it is.  At the moment, it was two marks for an hour.

At the counter, I froze.  I'm mostly, but not completely, incompetent in German, but I knew how to ask for an hour of Internet use.  But for some reason I couldn't put the words together right at that moment.

"Would you like to use the Internet?" the cashier said, very nicely, but with perhaps a very slight bit of condescension.

"Yes," I said, probably getting red in the face.  I fumbled in my pocket for two marks, and found a computer.  I checked my e-mail (nothing interesting), and made reservations for two nights in Koln, then yielded the balance of my time to Shorty.

We wandered around the neighborhood for a while, looking for someplace to eat, and finally settled on a bar advertising a special of Lammfleisch mit Rosenkohl.  I was under the mistaken impression that rosenkohl was red cabbage, which sounded really good right then, but it was in fact brussells sprouts, which I don't mind but wasn't quite what I'd been hoping for.  Good meal, though.
 

Next--December 26: Publicity stunt.