kitewithfish

So, while yesterday started with mostly a wandering tour of the remnants of the Berlin Wall, today was a little bit more wide ranging.

We started out at Treptower Park, which is a lovely little park in the East Side of Berlin, as well as home to the massive Soviet War Memorial. Johanna took me down there via Schnellbahn which was bursting full of people and yet more lively and friendly than anything I've ever seen in Vienna, even at rush hour. The park itself was very sweet and full of oaks and mole-hills, as well as an iron statue of Aesop's fable of the fox and the stork. The Soviet Memorial itself was crushingly huge, totally outside the normal human scale, and carefully planned- the highest point of the monument is still above the treeline of the surrounding park, despite the trees having had years to try and surpass it since its completion.

From Treptower Park, we headed a bit more west to Kreuzberg, which is felt rather like Cambridge, MA- lively, full of coffee houses and experimental fashion, as well as a large gay and Turkish population. (I saw a lesbian couple wandering around with their dogs holding hands- I now feel officially more at home in Berlin than in Vienna.) We stopped and had coffee at a place Johanna remembered having been before (but only after we had got inside for a while.) I'm going to make a point of trying to get back here again- it's worth looking at, I would say.

We wandered around East Berlin some more- Karl Marx Allee in particular. Many of the buildings there are of the old massive Soviet style- huge concrete slabs covered in bright colors and tile to make them more livable. Everything was slightly run-down and interesting to look at.

As we were wandering, we were theorizing about stuff that makes Berlin so fascinating- Johanna is fulfilling her life goal of living here, having fallen in love with the city herself years ago.

Part of the reason, we think, is the aftermath of a the heavy bombings. Berlin has a very uneven texture of it's buildings- many times, a thickly settled block of buildings will have a sudden gap where a building obviously collapsed and has never been replaced- the neighboring buildings have unpainted plain brick without windows. Many of these places have been turned into little pathways or small parks for the surrounding people. Some of the worst areas were bombed flat and have larger parks with memorials at the center, but many of them were also later rebuilt in more modern styles. The buildings are fascinating- some of them twist around older buildings that survived the worst, others are just bizarre after the architect's own whims. But they're never boring, and everything is always just packed full of people all the time. It's... kind of amazing, actually. The feeling is ironically very similar to the twistiness of London's geography.

Also, in my case, I find that I feel more comfortable in areas that are made of brick. It's weird, I can't really explain it, but red brick makes me feel comfortable.