vango

One of the interesting buildings in Berlin was the Haus des Lehrers (“the house of the teacher”)at Alexanderplatz. It features a mural done in a Mexican Mosaic style.


It was restored in 2002. I found an interesting article about the Mural and the buildings restoration. Over the years when tiles fell off the janitors collected them and stored them in the basement so the mural could be restored with original pieces.

We had reserved a table at the restaurant on the roof on the Reichstag for 12:30 but they took us a bit earlier. It isn't a big place but it has a spectacular terrace. Ron had the traditional Schnitzel while I had barbecue chicken. We were parched so consumed 3 liters of water during the meal. They fancied themselves a high end restaurant and at least the price made it so. Lunch was 85 euros.
It was an open kitchen plan with the kitchen on the left and the bar on the right. Other functions like dishwashing was in the basement with a dumbwaiter system to move things around.. Seating was about 8 rows of tables and chairs on the inside and a bit of seating outside on the terrace. The outer wall was on tracks and could be removed to give the place the feel of being totally outdoors. The balcony was 40 meters up giving a spectacular view of the city.



After lunch we descended to the main entrance and waited to be let out of the building. The inner doors would open and they would fill the foyer then the outer door would open. You just could not runn out of the building.
It was hot and the place was hoping. Because of street closures everyone was using the two lane street by the Reichstag. Luckily we snagged a taxi and came back to the hotel for a rest. Later in the afternoon I went in search of Chocolate and wandered into the KaDeWe department store, Kaufhaus des Westens..It is 7 floors of sales space something like Macy's on steroids. My main reason for walking over there was to get the lay of the land. We would be on the square the next day for the parade.

Friday we had tickets to tour the Reichstag. Building where the German Parliament meets. It is an historic building built in 1894 to house the German Imperial Diet. It was used until 1933 when it burned. It was partially refurbished in 1960 but nothing was really done until the 1990s after reunification. It was quite an amazing building when it was built with four towers and a dome. The facade has beautiful carvings and interesting art There have been many changes in the 120 years that the building has been around.



We knew that it would be possible to tour the building but it was being renovated. After checking Ron discovered that there was a week of tours when we would be in Berlin. Getting booked on a tour is a challenge because they want to do a background check of everyone visiting the building. If you haven't booked early, you have to visited a registration building where they start the paperwork. I could take a couple of days to get cleared. We arrived in Berlin with our clearances in hand and a tour booked for 10:30 on Friday.



We started early taking a taxi to the building. It was a good thing we did because there were detours and street closures. Traffic was a nightmare. We were able to hop out of the cab and go directly to the entrance. Ron checked in and we were on the list. It was necessary to wait a bit until a school group checked in.
The Check-in process is easy but time consuming. There is a small building made out of portable structures with metal detectors and x-ray machines. We were given badges labeled HFA while the German badges had only HF. We decided the A stood for Anglophone. We saw some badges labeled HFK but weren't sure what that stood for.



We were escorted in a lower door to an elevator then up to the first floor to wait in side lounge just outside the assembly hall. Our guide Ingmar arrived for our tour taking is South along a corridor. We stopped at a meditation room where an alter was present. There was a group of wooden chairs in rows and a simple wooden cross on display. She was quick to point out that the cross wasn't fixed and could be replaced with other symbols. The room had a half dozen pieces of art created with nails. From the chapel we walked to the corridor that passed behind the assembly room. The to side chambers held Russian Graffiti from a time with the Soviet Union occupied the city after WWII. It was in remarkably good shape due to the 1960s renovation that covered the walls with sheet rock. The words are peoples names and cities written with charred wood from the fire that destroyed the dome. You can make out city names like Kiev and Moscow.



The corridor is where the members of Parliament enter when they are meeting. Behind this building is an office building of the Bundestag, the government. During the division by the allies the Reichstag was in the British sector while the building behind it was in the Soviet section. When the wall was built these two buildings were separated for 30 years. A dark line of tiles mark the location of the wall.
We stopped at the doors at the back of the chamber. There are three sets of double doors that are labeled Ja, Nein and Enthaltung, the German for Abstain. When they are having big votes they can make a show of emptying the room and counting in the votes. by members entering a door for their vote.
We proceeded to the second floor when members of the public can look down on the assembly. This area is just under the dome which is supported by 12 concrete columns around the base. The dome which is part of the air-conditioning system projects through this space and come to a point just over the main floor. Since the hall was being reworked all the chairs were covered in plastic.



On the second floor area are meeting rooms for the various political parties. They basically have used the four corner towers of the building for these rooms. On top of three of these towers is a German flag while the fourth tower holds the EU Flag.
The building has a lot of art pieces. One artist works in LED art. Her contribution is a column of single letters streaming from the basement upwards in a stair well. The words formed are from 42 speeches delivered to Parliament over the years.

Thursday Morning found us still recovering from a day of travel. We woke up late and were moving kind of slow. We ate breakfast around 10 am and tried to decide how we felt. We decided to take a Taxi to the Brandenburg Gate and have a look. We piled into the cab and were off for the center of the city.
The gate is a monument of stone and statuary that used to actually be a city gate but things have changed and now the traffic flows around the west side and the block on the east side is a pedestrian area. To the south of the gate is the American Embassy and to the north is the French Embassy. The embassies have been there a long time but both buildings are new. In what used to be a guard shack is now the tourist information bureau. Going farther east is the Hotel Adlon with liveried doormen. Then comes the massive Russian Embassy with a wheat motif in the doors and fences.



This pedestrian area is alive with pedicabs, horse drawn carriages and gawking tourists. It is a great people watching spot. You see all nationalities and amazing dress. Everyone trying to take a selfie with the gate. We found a small cafe with tables outside and sat for a while. I enjoyed a German cola drink called Fritz Kola. Neither of us wanted to walk a lot so I suggested that we take a hop on tour. We found their parking spot and waited for the next bus but when it came it was full as was the second one. Ron decided that he wanted more sleep so he took a cab to the hotel and I boarded the bus to see the sites.



The bus had gone two stops when it started to rain and the hostess moved us all downstairs and inside. It is always miserable in the bottom of the bus where you can see almost nothing of the outside world. I had been enjoying the open air even if it was trying to rain. The rain let up enough for us to return to the top of the bus in time to see the Victory column, Siegessäule from Sieg ‘victory’ + Säule ‘column’. It was built to commemorate the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian War, by the time it was inaugurated on 2 September 1873, Prussia had also defeated Austria in the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The bronze sculpture of Victoria, 8.3 metres high and weighing 35 tons adorns the top. The locals call her Goldelse or Golden Lizzy. This feature used to be in front of the Riechstag building but the Nazis had great plans and so it was moved to the present location in 1939 at an intersection called the great star.



From there we proceeded past a train station that used to be the main West Berlin stop then south to the big shopping district on Tauentzienstraße where the Europa center is located. We made a scheduled rest stop which gave me a chance to see the Weltkugelbrunnen and a sculpture called Berlin but nicknamed the dancing noodles.



Berlin was divided into four parts by the Allies after the war. This sculpture of four chrome tubes symbolizes the four parts and designed to evoke broken chains. It was erected in 1987 before the wall came down.



Weltkugelbrunnen means world fountain. It was built in 1983 of red granite blocks and is about 8.5 meters in diameter. It is very costly to run so it has sponsors to pay the 75,000 Euros a year.
Just up the street is the Kaufhaus des Westens department store. It is a huge iconic building that has been around since 1907.. It is the largest deparment store in Europe.which is usually called the KaDaWe.with 60,000 square meters of display space and 380,000 items available. This store is about 2 blocks from our hotel and near the Wittenbergplatz, Berlin U-Bahn station.

Berlin is known for design and the Axel Hotel is high style in the heart of Berlin's gay district. I got one of the best hotel rooms that the Axel had to offer. It was truly a trip. It seems to have drawn inspiration from the seventh room from the Poe story, “Mask of the Red Death.” The room is black with red accents. The bedroom is round with the king bed facing a curved wall with four floor to ceiling windows overlooking the street. There is a massive set of drapes, one sheer and the other a total blackout curtain to shut this windows off. Behind the headboard of the bed is a large window to the bathroom with a jacuzzi tub beyond the glass. The glass is tinted red. Being six floors above the street it is unlikely that people will look up but it is Germany so it may be unlikely that they would care.

On each end of the bedroom are small anterooms. The east one had a sofa while the west on has a small writing desk. Each has their own floor to ceiling window. These rooms connect with the bathroom so it is possible to go from one side of the room to the other using the bathroom as a corridor.
Above the bed is a two foot beachball like lamp to light the room. All the lighting is led spots. There is a minibar with a bar set for entertaining.

The Axel advertises that it is Hetrofriendly. To live up to its reputation, there are three signs that can be placed outside the room. “C” requests that the room be cleaned. “P” requests privacy for the guests. The third one “D” tells other hotel guests that it is OK to knock and drop by.
It was a very long day and neither Ron nor I were willing to pull ourselves together for dinner. I went next door to the Bellisimo Pizzaria and brought back two helpings of Spaghetti Bolognese. We recuperated from our filghts so we could meet the day on Thursday. I would have liked to spent more time wandering but only walked enough to find the restaurant and a small Kiosk for my Coca Cola. On this Wednesday night the Art Hotel Bar was spilling out into the street with handsome drinking patrons.



Our room is the top right of this photo on the round part with gold around the windows.

We have really enjoyed sailing with RSVP. It is a travel agency in Minneapolis that runs exclusively gay cruises. They rent the entire ship and make it a party so when the offer came we grabbed it. Actually, by they time we could grab it one of the two segments was sold out so we grabbed the sailing from Nuremberg to Amsterdam planning our own extensions. The Package that RSVP offered was to fly to Prague to start the tour but there wasn't really a lot of time planned for Prague especially after travel time.
Prague is in the old Eastern block of nations so there is no direct train line to Nuremberg. That meant a five hour bus trip to get to the boat. We decided to save Prague for another day and visit Berlin instead. We only got to visit Berlin on a bus tour from the Viking Star in May of 2015. Six hour was used just getting to the city and back to the boat. I got to see the Brandenburg gate from the wrong side of the bus. So We started in Berlin with four days to see the city.
We would finish the pretrip with two nights in Nuremberg at the hotel we enjoyed so much when we visited for the Christmas Markets, the Drei Raben. That would give us a couple of warm days in that city with a chance to enjoy summer weather. The ship sailed from Nuremberg so it was a good plan.

The longest day of the trip was Berlin mainly because we couldn't dock anywhere near the place. It was a three hour bus ride from Warmmunde. We left the port at 6:30 in the morning for the ride which was mostly on and interstate style highway. We left with an escort from the company named Mario and an escort from the ship. It was a three hour drive to Berlin with a rest stop at a convenience store along the autobahn.





We met the “real” tour guide at Charlottenburg Palace for a drive around Berlin. There is a view down the road to the Brandenburg gate with a lot to see along this boulevard. The street crosses the Spree River along the way.
Technically Charlottenburg is a part of Greater Berlin but we drove from there into the old city of Berlin to see the various city sites.





In the center of the city there are pipes running above ground everywhere. This part of the city is a bit marshy and the water has to be drained away during construction. The pipes have been painted pink or blue so they don't seem as ugly.











We visited the only standing segment of the Berlin Wall which became an art piece after the fall. It is about a kilometer long and contains dozens of pictures, cartoons and slogans about the wall. Sadly, it has been defaced by taggers who are too young to remember the wall's power.





We stopped at a famous work featuring Mikhail Gorbachev kissing East German Leader Erich Honecker at the 40th anniversary of the wall. There was a crowd gathered and we added to it. One old couple joined the frenzy by recreating the kiss then asked the guide who the picture was.





Where the wall has been destroyed the city has marked the route with a dark cobblestone stripe in the pavement. It just looks like a decorative boarder until it suddenly veers into the street.