November 5 Berlin

We said goodbye to our tour group yesterday so today we were once more on our own. We bought an all day tram pass, hopped on and rode to the train station. I had copied seven pages of instructions for printing our train ticket so I was nervous about it. Well, I followed the instructions and it took about 45 seconds. Errand completed, we had a full day in Berlin ahead of us.

So we walked around! We exchanged seeing monuments from a bus to observing Berlin on foot and on a human scale. I’d been asking myself why people love this city and today I found some answers.

Excellent public transportation. The train station is large, sleek and surprisingly mellow, with very efficient ticket machines.

The trams run every ten minutes or so. A sign at the stop tells you when it will arrive; a sign inside tells you where you are. There’s an entrance for strollers and bikes. The ride is quiet, smooth and clean.

Parks. We walked through lovely parks and a wide path along the Spree River.

We peeked into a school playground where kindergarten sized children were playing in the woods and climbing trees. (I’d read about this movement to let kids get dirty and maybe even fall down!)

Food: People are still eating in outdoor cafes in November. I ate the best cookie, perhaps of my life, in the train station. Decorated with a dusted cocoa star, I thought it was a sort of flat Russian tea cake. But inside the slightly crispy crust I bit into gooey Nutella.

We had lunch in a sophisticated Asian fusion place. To atone for the cookie I had a thin beet soup that I believe was flavored with miso. The restaurant did not serve bread, nor sugar with the strong coffee.

For dinner, we dined at a Turkish restaurant in our neighborhood. Mike and I shared the lamb platter with rice, roasted vegetables and secret sauces. My dessert, translated as “sesame paste” tasted like halvah with the consistency of thick crunchy peanut butter. Sublime.

Art. We have not been into a museum for several days but we found plenty of art out and about.

We participated in an art installation “Handshape.” Here’s how it worked: a purple haired guy introduced us each to a stranger. Our task was to chat and find something we had in common. I met Billie from England. We discovered we had both lived in East Anglia. Mike met Pete, a Berliner who loves the outdoors. Once we had made our connection, the purple guy gave us a lump of clay that we grasped together so our fingers imprinted. The handshapes were added to the sculpture. Eventually there will be a shape for each day since November 9, 1989. You can find out more at http://www.handshape.berlin.

Humanizing the Wall. We visited the Berlin Wall Memorial. Here is a swath of the wall, about 100 meters wide, turned into a park and visitors’ center.

Along with an intact guard tower and fragments of the wall, we encountered memorials to victims, restoration of a cemetery and a parklike setting used by tourists, students, bicyclists and parents pushing strollers. Rather than sad, the memorial space left me feeling more knowledgeable and hopeful.

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On foot, Berlin appeared alive, youthful, hopeful and vibrant; a beautiful city reinventing itself. I didn’t expect that we’d wish we had several more days to spend in Berlin.