Lew Perin
Maybe it wasn’t smart to start our annual Germany trip on (USA) Labor Day?
But we got to JFK like true stingy NYC sophisticates, taking the A train to Lefferts Blvd and getting takeout from one of the roti shops there before transferring for free to the Q10 Limited, which gets you to the airport quickly.
And actually we breezed through bag check and security on supposedly a crushingly heavy travel day. Go figure!
Next stop Berlin…
Lew Perin
Re tethered caps on plastic bottles: https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/07/02/why-are-bottle-caps-attached-to-the-bottle-inside-the-eu-directive-causing-drink-spills-ev
h/t @schnedan
Lew Perin
Does Germany have louder pop music shows than the USA? I swear there are more hearing aid shops than laundromats in Berlin.
Lew Perin
Another thing that irks me about the German bottled water industry is the way the caps are moored to their plastic bottles. When you unscrew the cap, it isn’t off the bottle, only ajar.
I can see how this makes it less likely you’ll lose the cap before you empty the bottle, but doesn’t it make the prospect of recycling the bottle even less likely? I mean, these are two very different types of plastic.
Lew Perin
The TV Tower (Fernsehturm) is a central Berlin landmark from the glory days of broadcast TV. From lots of places you can just look upward and see it to orient yourself.
But when you see it peeking over the left shoulder of a church on the Museum Island, it looks like some weird annex to the church, maybe an extra cupola in the form of a censer?
Lew Perin
No socks in view with what has to be the oldest pair of sandals in Berlin. These are from the Egyptian New Kingdom, three millennia or so ago.
Lew Perin
Near the exit in the Altes Museum there’s a vitrine where the museum shows its sense of humor, or politics, or both.
Lew Perin
I sure learned something new to me from this ancient Greek cup. The woman squatting over the chamber pot was a hetaira, a member of a class of sex workers who could make educated conversation with clients, almost like geisha.
Lew Perin
We spent today in the ancient world (Greece, Etruria, Rome, Egypt) at three different museums on the Museum Island.
I would say the collections in Berlin beat the Metropolitan Museum in NYC in artistic merit, preservation, and often the captioning. I love the frank admission of uncertainty about this Greek god[dess].
Lew Perin
Speaking the U-bahn, the station near our hotel makes me think of the D line along 86th St in Brooklyn.
Lew Perin
Speaking of political art, this evening on the U2 line of the Berlin U-bahn, the woman sitting across from me had her look down cold. Cut-off denim shorts, knee-high socks with fishnet stockings, topped by a t-shirt depicting a spider with text: WEAVING THE DEATH OF PATRIARCHY.
Lew Perin
The Gemäldegalerie is part of a complex of museums built in recent decades. In this “neighborhood” now there are long wooden walls taller than a human emblazoned Barbara Kruger style with slogans challenging the idea of borders.
Obviously this has a strong political valence, especially in Germany now. But the text is in English exclusively! Do the brains behind this see immigration-wary compatriots as part of their audience? No, only anglophone cosmopolitans like me, it seems.
Lew Perin
Even if you can’t get there before the Hals show ends November 3, the Gemälderie is sooo worth visiting. It has lots of paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and ter Borch, and a couple each by Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, and Vermeer.
By the time we left, we had no time or energy left for more staring at art for the day.
Lew Perin
Last time we were in Berlin, we drifted around many neighborhoods on foot and all the public transport modes, hardly hitting any of the normal touristic marks. This time we’re trying to make the most of the 3-day all-museum pass.
Today we went to the astounding Frans Hals show at the Gemäldegalerie (painting gallery) of the Staatliche Museen. The show is big and well-annotated enough to show Hals’s aesthetic and ideological/intellectual daring in the settings where he could get away with it.
Lew Perin
We took a late afternoon walk in our hotel’s neighborhood Schōneberg during which we had the great luck to meet an old woman who explained the weird structure pictured.
It was a bunker built by the Nazi government during the Allied bombing raids. After the war there were attempts to demolish it, but they failed. In the 80s a modern building went up right next to it, so no more blasting—Berlin had to accept an accidental monument!
Lew Perin
Berlin gripe №2: Drivers here are as aggressive as those of South Brooklyn. Not as sloppy or noisy or obviously preening, but if you’re a pedestrian you’re on your own, kid. There are lots of stretches of high-speed boulevards in Brooklyn where a New York road designer would install a traffic light, but Berliners? Do they find the spectacle of pedestrians running for their lives amusing?
…
Okay, we’re fully hydrated now and Berlin is a great city!
Lew Perin
Berlin gripe №1: Is the city controlled by Big Mineral Water or what? You can’t satisfy your thirst here without buying bottled water. Restaurants don’t serve tap water, and Berlin tap as evidenced by our hotel isn’t bad. And Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent of Central Park in NYC, doesn’t have water fountains.
Lew Perin
If you want to see how grumpy a given city can make you, try flying into it sleepless early in the morning of a hot day, knowing you can’t change into shorts and sandals till your hotel’s 3PM check-in time.
That was us today in Berlin.
Lew Perin
Wooden utensils with our airline food? Actually they’re made of bamboo, and I managed to get a splinter. But I’m not gonna sue Delta, I’m so magnanimous.
The flight attendant says on flights terminating in the USA the bamboo cutlery gets burned along with the rest of the food service trash. On flights to Germany? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lew Perin
In the museum grounds there’s a surprising early twentieth century comic statue of a chicken thief.
Lew Perin
Today we took the advice of one of Spouse’s favorite Bavarian relatives and spent most of the day in Alt-Kőpenick on the eastern outskirts of Berlin. It’s a cute old town with some terrific architecture plus an old castle with parklike grounds and, in the castle proper, a pretty amazing museum of objects created to support the lifestyles of European nobility over many centuries.
(Visiting the museum was a way to use up the last day of our 3-day Berlin museum passes.)
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