Notices by Lew Perin (babelcarp@social.tchncs.de), page 2

There’s an elevator, but at least once you should take the vertiginous staircase that snakes around the curved inside wall.

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.

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!

I don’t know how it came to be, but I’m grateful for a uniformity across seemingly every German city of medium size or larger: the main train station (Hauptbahnhof = Hbf) will be right next to the central bus station (Zentralomnibusbahnhof = ZOB.) This makes switching between intercity buses and trains *so* much easier.

I have an obsessive desire to say ZOB out loud as a monosyllable with German pronunciation, with an unvoiced explosive final consonant.🔥

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!

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.

We spent most of the day today in the old city of Lűbeck, partly because of the architecture and partly because of the Bach lore.

When JS Bach was 20 he walked something like 250 miles for the opportunity to hear Buxtehude play organ in Lűbeck.

When we got into Lűbeck we stopped at a pharmacy so Spouse could pick up some throat lozenges. I couldn’t help noticing how cheap covid test kits were there.

Is that because nobody wants them? (Almost nobody is wearing a face mask in public places in Germany these days.)

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.

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.

Lűbeck’s town wall was erected in the 13th century. In 1670 someone had the bright idea to build a half-timbered house into a semicircular bay in the wall, presumably to economize on…something?

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.

Speaking of the city wall, once upon a time this insane building was a gate in the wall.

If someone ever makes a film of Mervyn Peake’s _Gormenghast_, they should use the Holstentor as a set.

Speaking the U-bahn, the station near our hotel makes me think of the D line along 86th St in Brooklyn.

Here in Lűbeck’s Marienkirche is where the encounter between Buxtehude and Bach happened. Were these organ pipes part of the event or was the organ destroyed in the 1943 Alled bombing raids and later replaced? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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].

Lűbeck lunch was at a generic Vietnamese restaurant, alas.

Today’s million-dollar idea: an inverse soy sauce that neutralizes excess salt in bad East Asian food.

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.

We got back to Hamburg in late afternoon. Even though neither of us is an early Beatles fan , we decided to go to the Reeperbahn to, I dunno, check it off our list?

So depressing! The street reminds me of NYC’s 42 St in the bad old days, with strung-out people drifting along talking to themselves or just lounging on the sidewalk.

Near the exit in the Altes Museum there’s a vitrine where the museum shows its sense of humor, or politics, or both.