Taxi 5:00 am Berlin time, in time to join a very long line at the British Air counter. I had checked in online and received inaccurate advice. Didn’t need the long line at all, but what else does one have to do at 5:20 am in Tegel Airport? Well, one can spend the time thinking of what to write today: thoughts of Berlin.
I noticed interesting faces around me on public transit and began surreptitiously to snap photos of them.
Berlin has a lot of green space, large parks like the Tiergarten and also many small parks tucked away in neighbourhoods. They were all well used even on weekdays. Flowers often grew in beds and on bushes along sidewalks. Here are some I liked best.
Construction is evident all over Berlin. There was a serious construction boom after World War II of course, and then another in the early 1990’s when the seat of the German government moved to Berlin. The Reichstag was restored but it couldn’t house the entire bureaucracy. Many new, interesting buildings are the result. Whether Berlin is experiencing another boom or whether this is just normal growth, I do not know. Here’s the view from the East Side Gallery.
I began to question what vibe I gave off after a woman with a gaggle of small children asked me for street directions. Amazingly enough I was able to give them! The next day the server at my local spoke to me in Spanish – la cuenta? Curiously I answered si.
Berlin is not an expensive city relative to London and Brussels which was a lovely surprise! I ate lunch at a Turkish restaurant one day and for €6 I received enough grilled chicken, potatoes and salad for lunch, dinner and breakfast the following day. I should have taken a photo of the enormous heap of food on my plate. I should have asked for an English translation of the menu. 🙂
Berlin does, however, have many many stairs. (There are lifts for the disabled but I chose particip-action!) During the seven days I spent in Berlin I climbed 6, 8, 5, 11, 16, 25 (thanks to the Berliner Dom) and 22 (thanks to Schloss Sanssouci) flights of 14 or more stairs. Which leads me to the answer to yesterday’s quiz: those numbers are the steps I took, according to the Health app on my iPhone, on each of the seven days in Berlin: 5.8 km, 9.4 km, 8.2 km, 10.3 km, 11.9 km, 11.7 km, 11.0 km. Now the challenge will be to continue the particip-action.
Berlin: beautiful, interesting, relatively inexpensive and good for the heart!
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