Wanderung 32

Drifting down the Donau; Edging up the Elbe

March - April 2017


 

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Friday April 28: Day in Berlin

We had a nice leisurely breakfast with our hosts, and set off to see Berlin shortly after 9 o'clock. First, we took the S1 train from Hermsdorf station, with its plot of flowers blooming out in front, to the Friedrichstrasse station, which is fairly centrally located in downtown Berlin. From there, we cut southward a block or two away from the Spree River to the "Unter Den Linden" street, which does in fact have rows of linden trees planted along the sides and along a promenade in the center.

We followed the promenade to the Brandenburg Gate, which Monika remembered being in the prohibited East Zone of Germany when she had visited it as a teenager. It is promising to see some of the long-term effects of WWII and the post-war occupation being erased over the last 30 years.

The German Reichstag or Parliament is just about one block away from the Brandenburg Gate, so we walked North past a Holocaust Memorial honoring the Roma and Sinti people (English: Gypsies), who were also slaughtered wholesale by the Nazi regime, and ended up at the Reichstag. The glass dome on the top of the building symbolizes the openness in government to which the German people are now devoted. Respect for human rights in general is now so ingrained in Germany, that I even had to be careful not to violate privacy whilst taking photographs.

We continued our meander through the adjacent Tiergarten park. The park is very large with a lot of monuments, artificial lakes and streams, and gardens within its boundaries, plus a lot of benches to sit down on when you get tired! We were particularly pleased to find a "classical music" column with the figures of Beethoven, Mozart, and Hayden carved into three sides in bass relief.

Around noon We left the park to the South and searched for a place to eat, ultimately having lunch at the Arkade, a small 3-story shopping center a few blocks South of the Tiergarten. I would recommend the Arkade for lunch because there were at least 3 or 4 nice cafes scattered though the three levels offering varied cuisines at a reasonable price. We settled on an Asian place, and I had a nice chicken + noodles + steamed Chinese vegetables + 200 ml Coke for 6.50 Euro, and Monika had chicken + rice for 5 Euro, so it was nice, hot meal at a quite reasonable price.

Although we got turned around when we left the Arkade (note to self: Take your compass!!!), we finally got straightened out and headed back into the Tiergarten. There we followed a stream that meandered through a rhododendron garden and a rose garden, on our way over to the Siegessaeule (Engish: Victory Column), which is a huge column with a gilded statue of Victory on top. The column is, however, surrounded by a huge traffic circle that is so busy that you have to get to the column itself by using underground tunnels!


 

From there we crossed one of the spoke streets feeding the traffic circle to see the Bismarck memorial and then the English Tea Garden. I was expecting a formal English boxwood type of garden, but what we found was just a set of teeny, tiny little fountains set in a lawn in front of a rather large tea house with an English-style thatched roof!

I was disappointed by that, but curiously a bit further on beyond the teahouse we did find both a formal rose garden and even a small garden with boxwoods planted in a typically English pattern, complete with some odd but lifelike bronze statues.

We had to go back past the Bismarck Memorial to get around to Bellevue Palace, the residence of the Bundespresident, to get to the river Spree and, more importantly, the nearest S Bahn station because we had been walking for hours and were totally exhausted! We took the next S Bahn past Hauptbahnhof over to the Friedrichstrasse station, then changed to the S 1 to go North to Hermsdorf. Despite resting on the train, I was still dog tired by the time we walked back to Eberhard and Birgit's house, so I turned in for a rather long nap. But that allowed me to be awake during supper and for chatting with our hosts afterwards, which is always a plus.



Copyright 2017 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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