Some delayed recap & comments on my fourth week (July 10-16) in Berlin, including a day trip with Ryan to Dresden.
Monday (July 10) was mostly occupied by our return to Berlin from Austria via Munich, but I was delighted by a suggestion from Ryan to try a rooftop bar called Klunkerkranich in Neukölln and further delighted by our mutual agreement to get up & go there instead of, you know, sleep.
Tuesday I met Ryan (after his work, after my workout class) at the Kulturforum, a collection of museums and the like (including the Philharmonie, which we visited back in June) near Potsdamer Platz. We visited an exhibition on Albrecht Dürer, Germany’s most famous artist, and the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts). The Kulturforum is also home to the Gemäldegalerie (literally ‘painting gallery’) and the Neue Nationalgalerie (I have already been to the Alte, or old, Nationalgalerie), both of which might warrant return visits.
After all of this we returned home and I made dinner for a second time in the apartment, and then we headed back out for an outdoor movie at Mariannenplatz in Kreuzberg. We saw The Banshees of Inisherin for the second time, and it held up to our original praise. It was also funnier than I remember (especially since the…“digital” aspect of the plot wasn’t as shocking). We were laughing more than the Germans were, but that is almost always the case.
On Wednesday afternoon Ryan met me in the Mitte and after an early Indian dinner we walked with and without aim along the Spree, around the Reichstag, through the Tiergarten before heading home.
Thursday I made a huge leap forward in my status as a Berlinerin and signed up for a library card at the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden, a beautiful place to work that makes a day spent on a laptop feel a lot less wasteful (hopefully not just wishful thinking as I am currently doing that exact thing now to write this). After pressing send on my Week 3 email I walked through the Nikolaiviertel on my way home. Later that night, Ryan and I made it to a state-sponsored DJ set-combo-drag queen performance at the Hamburger Bahnhof, a former train station that’s been converted to a contemporary art museum (what an incredible sentence).
Friday was Dresden, which I’ll recount in a bit, but on Saturday the weather forecast was in the 90s and we headed to Spandau with a large picnic packed to sunbathe and swim. Spandau is the western terminus of the U7 train line that runs next to our apartment, and the ride was a normally-easy-but-hungover-very-difficult 40 minutes. The water we swam in is really just the Havel river where it widens before meeting the Spree, but in some areas it’s referred to as Spandauer See. It was a bit green but refreshing and a fun excursion. We walked through Old Spandau on our way back to the train, which feels like a German village completely unrelated to Berlin, which in many ways it is — Spandau was its own medieval town with its own fortress (the Zitadelle, which we could see from where we were swimming) and was only incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920.
And on Sunday, Ryan and I walked and biked through Tempelhofer Feld, including the decommissioned Flughafen building which houses some offices and museum exhibits but in general needs some more time to become an example of well-repurposed space. The airfield, on the other hand, is one of the best ways I can imagine spending a summer Sunday in Berlin.
Ryan and I spent Friday in Dresden, capital of Saxony, home to 550,000 or so (about as many as Albuquerque or Baltimore), two hours south of Berlin by train. Dresden is most famous to Americans for being bombed at the end of World War II — this killed 25,000 people, mostly civilians, destroyed the Altstadt (old town) and few strategic targets, and provided the Germans with moral high ground, both immediately and years later (perhaps unfairly, it’s worth noting that modern Saxony is a stronghold of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, party in Germany).
Saxony, as the Duchy of Saxony, the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of Saxony, was once a very rich place, and now, like most former East German states, it’s not. But only Saxony’s former glory and none of its modern troubles — including, to some extent, the infamous WWII bombing — come to mind when walking through the Altstadt of Dresden, which has been entirely rebuilt. In the most complimentary way, it felt like a history theme park: clean, with a spire or dome or both on every building and a museum or church or palace on every block.
Most guides I read encourage visitors to Dresden to leave the Altstadt (“the exit to the theme park is on the north side”) and visit the Neustadt across the Elbe, especially the Äußere Neustadt, or outer new town. They described the area as hip, young, contemporary: “while the Altstadt was busy turning the clock back, the Neustadt across the Elbe River was looking forward.” Following these instructions, Ryan and I wasted almost two hours walking across the river to a small cluster of restaurants and shops, all of them closed on a Friday afternoon, nearly all of them some sort of casual Asian fusion, before giving up and coming back to the Altstadt on the tram. This caused me to think a lot about “tourist-phobia” — why on Earth would I want to spend two of my eight hours in the city that has been called “Florence on the Elbe” as the only patron of a graffitied restaurant serving bi bim bap a whole two miles away Rafael’s Sistine Madonna? Is it because this is “the real Dresden,” and the only people in the Altstadt are tourists? Well, I am a tourist, and while that might be good advice if I was moving to Dresden (I certainly don’t wish I was living on Museum Insel in Berlin), I thought it was bad advice for a quick trip.
Anyways, some photos.
This week’s power ranking is on Wegbiers, the beers that we drink while walking around in Berlin. These aren’t necessarily pregaming beers, but they can be. Mostly though it’s just what you do when you’re done with work and walking around the city on a nice summer day — go to a Späti (pronounced shpay-tee) and pay 2.50€ (apparently an inflation-affected price) for a Wegbier (pronounced with a v, not a w). Here is a ranking of the ones Ryan and I were able to try this week.
Augustiner Edelstoff: readers may recognize this as the same beer I drank in Munich. Drinking it from a bottle is a much less noble experience than from a cask in a liter-size Maß in a Biergarten, but it still does the job. This is apparently called an export lager: “a bottom-fermented beer like Helles, originally made in the mid 19th century to ship overseas. It has stronger malt flavors, and a bit higher alcohol content of over 5%.” Likely because the Edelstoff is a slightly different formulation than the usual Wegbier, which is almost always a Hell, I was actually surprised by how it tasted (good, different). It also costs a little more and isn’t stocked at every Späti.
Augustiner Lagerbier Hell: another pick from the Augustiner brand, this time a Hell. Augustiner themselves call it “particularly mild, sparkling, long-stored beer, refreshing and easily digestible” — none of this reads as positive to me. The notes that I took while drinking this beer were that “it tastes like all of the other Wegbiers that I can remember, but this one was very cold,” and that’s more or less a review of the Späti’s fridge. This one gets 2nd place and is usually my go-to because I like the label.
Brauhaus Tegernsee Tegernseer Hell: I also often pick this one because of the label. It tastes the same as #2. My notes: “It’s fine. It’s a little flat. It’s not bitter or malty or really anything.”
Grüner Vollbier Hell: At this point I had realized that all of the Helles beers taste exactly the same and I stopped taking tasting notes.
Schneider’s Helles Landbier: Again, no notes on taste, but I did notice while drinking this one at Tempelhofer that a big problem with Wegbiers is that they get flat from all of the walking. Best to drink them quickly or sit with them in a park.
Pilsator Pilsener: This didn’t taste like a Hell, but it didn’t taste great. I don’t know. I would probably still buy it again.
And, lastly, the best things I ate this week:
Neapolitan pizza festival in Gleisdreieck park
Indian food (we each got a thali with three different dishes) at Chelany in Mitte
Crispy duck at Aroma in Charlottenburg
Week 5 will be coming soon — bis dann!