The Transhuman Comedy

Sorry for the long silence, but Liz and I were traveling in Germany last month and I had better things to do than blog. Let's roll through some highlights:

• We spent our first few days around Frankfurt. Hessenpark in Neu-Anspach is an old-style village, built from old buildings retrieved from around the state of Hessen, with craft exhibits and demonstrations. It reminded me of a renaissance festival, but without the fantasy imagery and the delusion that life was better 400 years ago. The bread tastes just as good today, and you don't have to store your wheat in a fortress to protect it from Landsknechts.
• We hit the touristy parts of Frankfurt: the Alte Oper, the Goethe Haus, the Roemer, the Dom.
• Deutsche Bahn to Berlin. We didn't stop in Sachsen-Anhalt or Brandenburg, but from the train windows, the former DDR didn't look any more rundown than Braunschweig. (No city looks attractive from the train, but Braunschweig especially looked rust-beltish). The distinctive sight in the rural stretches of the old DDR were windmill farms, blades big enough to kill rocs slowly spinning over green fields. A government subsidy, I presume--a map in the Deutsches Museum (for technology) in Muenchen showed average windspeeds across Germany: the highest in the mountains and on the coasts, the lowest in, you guessed it, Sachsen-Anhalt and Brandenburg.
• We had a great time in Berlin. We stayed at Hotel Lindenufer, in Spandau, a perfectly adequate hotel with the chief advantage of standing 20 meters from the top of the escalator from a U-bahn station. (In fact, Liz and I emerged from the subway with our luggage, looking along the street for the hotel and wondering if we'd made a mistake, until we looked up and saw the sign).
• La Bottega, on Breitestrasse in Spandau, is an excellent and inexpensive Italian restaurant.
• Maybe it's just me, or maybe things have changed in 15 years, but Zoo Station doesn't live up to the hype engendered by the U2 song.
• Speaking of changes, eastern Berlin, or at least the parts we saw, has recovered from the DDR era. High rise office buildings near the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station; a thick crowd in Alexanderplatz; an Irish pub in Hackescher Markt.
• It was intensely gratifying to see that we--the free peoples of the West--won. The biggest building on Alexanderplatz, former showplace of DDR government buildings, was a six-story department store, and on the square outside, hucksters offered DDR uniform hats and Warsaw Pact gas masks for sale. The Roman marbles in the Pergamon stare at S-bahn trains joining Zoologischer Garten and Hackescher Markt. Best of all was Checkpoint Charlie; all that remains is the last guardhouse in the middle of Friedrichstrasse and the footprint of the Wall on the former Wessi sidewalk on Zimmerstrasse. Construction fencing, wire mesh with green plastic, blocks off a building site in the former DDR death ground. As for the guardhouse, tourist trappers have taken it over--for a few Euro, you can get your photo taken with a young man in US Army colors holding a six-foot US flag; for a few more, you can get DDR visa stamps in your passport from a girl in an Ossi Grenzepolizei uniform. The only thing that will make it better is when the construction is complete across Zimmerstrasse and a Starbucks occupies the bottom corner of the former death ground. "And all the shame/Was on the other side," if you'll let me wax heroic for a moment.
• Es tut uns leid, Sonja, wir sind nach einer Shisha-Lounge in Prenslauer Berg nicht gefahren. Naechstes mal!
• The dingiest place we saw in Berlin was, in fact, on the Wessi side, changing from S- to U-bahn at Yorckstrasse. Graffiti, run down shops, slackers who lack the gumption to move into hipsterville in Nikolaiviertel. It struck me as Muenchenerstrasse near the Frankfurt train station, but without the charm.
• Speaking of the S-bahn, we found out where the train to nicht einsteigen takes you.
• If you want to impress a 7-12 year old German child, show them pictures you took of Knut the polar bear while at the Berlin Zoo.

That's about the first half of our trip. More to come!

Labels: Germany, travel