The (somewhat) lighter side of Berlin

This morning, we had arranged a tour of the German parliament building along with a visit to the Jewish History Museum. But as we got ready last night, sorting out details, Ron asked about going to one of the art museums of Berlin’s beautiful Museum Island.

The Museum Island is a UNESCO site of 5 massive museums that look like this (this is just one of them, pic not mine). There’s art, history, Egyptian culture, German history and more.

Here’s the Altes Museum, from 1825, a Neoclassical masterpiece on the outside. I did not investigate the inside nor take this picture myself:)

You can sort of see the massive Museum Island buildings lined up here, which might give you a sense of how much there is to see:

And I hope you understand my level of WWII history exhaustion when I tell you that I agreed to Ron’s change of plan and we went over to Museum Island and scrapped the history touring for today – we are just too overwhelmed to see any more of the excruciating evidence left behind by the Nazis.

Ron argued his case in very convincing fashion. Those of you who know him well know that he is an huge fan of Egyptian history. So, to support his request to tour the Neues Museum – with its Egyptian and ethnological collections, Ron stressed that he really wanted to see the Neferifi bust. I try and try to convince him that it’s Nefertiti but Ron is unconvinced, I think, and he maintains that, for most things, close enough is fine and I suppose we can all just be grateful that he was never a brain surgeon or an aviation engineer.

Here’s the Neferifi bust:

We did manage to make our Reichstag tour, even if we skipped the history portion of the day. Here’s a picture from the inside of the Reichstag. The parliamentary room is surprisingly modest with upholstered blue chairs you might find at IKEA:

Here’s a shot of the exterior of the dome (pic not mine). From inside the dome, you are (allegedly) presented with a fantastic view around Berlin. You can tell when a picture isn’t mine, I think, because the sky is blue and it’s sunny out. We have had exactly one nice sunny day on our trip so far – 27 days in!

So here’s what the dome view actually looked like for us:

And here’s an interior view of the glass dome:

We also spent some time at the DDR museum and the Checkpoint Charlie museum. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum has a bewildering dual display system: 1) There’s a fairly cohesive path through the museum that focuses on stories of attempts to escape East Germany and 2) There’s a parallel exhibit that wanders through that focuses on anything and everything from the beginning of time until now.

By ignoring everything but the escape stories, we enjoyed the museum. I do think that perhaps culling some of the exhibits might help…there was an ENTIRE room devoted to the life of Ronald Reagan.

Here are a couple of the escape pictures: – these were actual successful escapes. And here’s a link to the infamous Tunnel 57 – 57 people got out using this: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-57-people-successfully-escaped-through-a-secret-tunnel-in-berlin-wall-after-wwii-76f304605366

We also stopped in at the DDR Museum. It’s way easier to navigate than the Checkpoint Charlie museum and has one single focus: what was life like for the average citizen in East Germany. It’s totally my kind of place. They’ve gathered up all the things that really grab my attention: the coffee pots, the blenders, the toilet paper, the crackers, the ovens and the telephones and they’ve created a memorial to the minutiae of life. I’d give the DDR museum a perfect A+ but for the fact that I couldn’t find a pair of East German tweezers there.

Here’s Ron looking as perplexed in an East German kitchen as he does in a Western US kitchen!

In a stroke of sheer museum curating genius, there are big displays of food products!

Bathroom hygiene? Yes!

I am sure we can all agree that it’s baffling that Ron gets so excited about the Nefertiti bust from 1345 BC when we can look at that green aerosol deodorant spray can above. But, hey, I guess there’s room for varying opinions:)

I’ll leave you with this. We decided to round out our investigation of German cars a la Porsche and Mercedes with a little time in an East German Trabi. The DDR Museum lets us get right into one. Same level of precision design and production standards as Porsche, I am sure! Our guide, Robert, told us that, under the East German government of the 1970s and 80s, the wait for a Trabi could be up to 16 years – and the Trabi is considered the worst car ever made. They put out four times the emissions of a normal car. They didn’t generally have brake lights or turn signals.

I can report that – in our glorious 3 minutes in a Trabi – I was only able to make it go backwards, bashing into various “virtual” parked cars behind me. And without a turn signal, there was just no way to let anyone know my plan:)

Some Berlin businessmen “rehabbed” some Trabis and rent them out to unsuspecting tourists, who we see tooling around Berlin, maxing out at about 15mpg, the cars belching out exhaust, leaving a gas aroma in their wake. Robert said that aroma – Trabi exhaust – is cemented in his head as the smell of his childhood. It’s hard to believe that any company would insure that rent-a-Trabi business model.

Next up – Amsterdam on King’s Day, with a million of our closest friends!