It is Saturday and doing errands today for the S.O. while she is out shopping for pottery. ( Like she really needs any more of it!). So a stop at the library seemed in order. The great internet drought may be ending next week, Vodafone is supposed to install a line next week. Just in time for me to go on the road for a couple of weeks.
Speaking of being on the road, here are a few more Berlin pix. First up, if you have to get around this fairly large city, why not do it not in style, in a crappy East German built car-that smoked and was underpowered? Come to find out there are evidently a lot of people willing to part with 75 Euro for a day of doing just that. There is an outfit called Trabi World (NO Curtis, it is not Tranny World) that will provide you a Trabant and you can scoot around town in a caravan of 5 or 6 of them together.
What is the Trabant, you ask? As I said, it was a car built in Germany back when it was a Communist zombie state. As a car it was small and as I said generally sucky in the get-up and go department. Especially compared to its counterparts in West Germany. But now it is something of a novelty:
At least they are colorful.
I was surprised to find a rather long stretch of the Wall remained. It is now called the east gallery. On the Western side, it is just German Grafitti, on the Eastern side it has been painted with art and images by various artists. ( and also defaced from time to time with graffitti). Here are of panels.
Here is a shot of the Western Side of the wall:
There is also a section of the wall that is preserved as a monument. It is called the topography of terror, and it details the rise of the Nazi’s and what it did to Germany. I was very surprised to read on one of the panels that Germany was ultimately to blame for the wall. By allowing the Nazis to come to power, it created the sequence of events that brought the Russians to the heart of Europe and to the heart of Germany. Not to mention losing lands that are and were historically German. It still does not excuse the excesses of either the Germans or the Russians-but I was surprised to see it admitted. In Japan you would never see such frankness.
And finally because the S.O. just called wanting to know where the hell I am, a shot of her by the East Gallery:
More to follow on the Tier Garten, a beautiful place.