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I have a personal theory that the further east you go, more and more culturally speaking it’s like the 1980s never ended. This theory was not harmed in the slightest by the discovery that they still have C&A in Germany.
Anyway, after leaving the dodgy heavy metal bar we strolled home up Karlmarxallee (the very name gave me a nosebleed) had a comparatively early night. Our hotel was quite a nice one (the staff, as everywhere, spoke perfect English and regarded my utterly hapless attempts to have a go at speaking German with polite resignation, just like pretty much everyone else I met) and thankfully there wasn’t a perfectly square bit of dirt on our bedroom window meaning that I dodged a potentially tricky situation.
We needed a comparatively early night as we had to be up and about the next morning – we were off to Potsdam and the trip was a good hour or two from where we were staying. Potsdam, if you haven’t heard of it, is, like Versailles, the sort of place you only get in countries where they’ve had an absolute monarchy. What happens, you see, is that one afternoon the Emperor thinks to himself “You know, I could really do with a salmon pink palace to go with my duck-egg blue palace”, and so he pops a pfennig on the price of an ounce of baccy and – hey presto! – before you know it the revenues are pouring in, construction on the ornamental gardens has begun, and all the nobles are scrambling to build themselves a little somewhere in salmon pink to keep in with the latest fad in palaces.
This compares to England, where the Monarch would go to Parliament and, wringing his crown in his hands in embarrassment, explain that the old palace had got some terrible leaks and the rain was getting in and would it be possible to get a few pounds to fix it up, and parliament would reply that if he didn’t want to be king there was a queue round the block of people willing to take the job if he wasn’t happy with it and he could be replaced like a shot. The upshot of this is that on the one hand Britain has fewer Potsdam and Versailles-like grandiose imperial follies, but on the other hand it still has a monarchy unlike all the pfennig-on-an-ounce-of-baccy types who never thought the good times would end.
Anyway, we had a light breakfast* and hopped on the train, where I was delighted to see several ruffians with study, heavily muscled dogs on short leads were already aboard and demonstrating that whilst I might have taken a break from Stevenage, its inhabitants were still with me in spirit. Our journey ran through old West Berlin and passed through an area called Wannsee, which I was deeply disappointed to note wasn’t twinned with Swansea. Missed a trick there, I thought.
Eventually we arrived in Potsdam town which, like much of Berlin (particularly the bits facing Russia), suffered terribly in the latter stages of the war but, once again like much of Berlin, is being comprehensively rebuilt in an almost exact reproduction of the old town. This entire project throughout the city simply never ceased to amaze me. Imagine, if you will, that the Luftwaffe had taken it upon themselves to level Edinburgh and maybe Bath as well, and the British set out to rebuild them just as they had been. It’s a project of that sort of scale and it is utterly fabulous. There’ll be a delightful chocolate-box church with several towers and bells ringing merrily inside them, and next to it there’ll be a little information board with a black and white picture of a forlorn pile of rubble which was taken in about 1947 which invites you to compare the before and after and – although nothing is ever directly said – also invites you to think very seriously about making sure nothing like that ever happens again.
The palaces and gardens are on the other side of town from the station so we strolled through Potsdam town, admiring the chocolate-box bits and ignoring the S.T.A.L.K.E.R-esque residential blocks that the communists had thrown up in that way they had which always suggests that when they said “To each according to his needs” what they reckoned people needed was 1500 calories a day, a jumpsuit, plenty of right angles and not many trees. These are thrown into sharp relief by the palaces and gardens which thankfully survived the fate of the Kaisers Palace in central Berlin. Built largely for the aforementioned Frederick the Great, they were the place where he came to hang out with his dogs and his special friends – he had another palace built on the other side of Berlin for the Empress and never spoke to her, which struck me as a very sensible arrangement for all concerned and one I might profitably learn from.
Although it’s possible to take tours, the she-David and I didn’t really have time as we had to get back to the airport and catch a plane, but as she scuttled off to powder her nose I entertained myself by surreptitiously eavesdropping on a group of startlingly stout tourists who had signed up for a tour and having discovered what was involved were engaged in a horrified, whispered conversation.
”Maisie-Bob! Maisie-Bob! He said the tour was going to take four hours!”
“Four hours of walkin’, Ellie-Jim? That’s whol’ year’s worth!”
“I know! Mah thaahs’ll chafe together somethin’ fierce!”
I couldn’t help but observe to myself as I waited that the stout people in the gardens were all tourists. Given how much the Germans appear to put away in the way of icecream and pretzels and sausages you would expect them to pork out to an impressive degree, but they seem to compensate pretty well by cycling everywhere.
We took a turn around the gardens, noting follies and fake temples and a lovely little tea-house, and then went around Sans Souci, a small, weekend palace of only 12 ornate rococo rooms which Frederick had built for himself and his closest chums** and which my GCSE French made me fairly confident in identifying as “Without Mice”, a situation much to be desired in a palace. Although the interior plumbing was lacking, Sans Souci is just the sort of place I could see myself taking myself off to for the weekend, and I couldn’t help but think it was a shame it’s not for hire.
Unfortunately time was against us. Time, tide and EasyJet wait for no man and we had to be back to the airport so it was back on the train to the city to collect our bags and, pausing for a bite to eat, I decided to have that staple of Berlin fast food, a currywurst. Stuffing it into my mouth I –
Jesus. Jesus. People actually eat this stuff? For pleasure? I mean, I actually took the time to buy it from one of the fancy riverside eateries so I at least expected the wurst to be in some way vaguely recognisable as a form of sausage. Wherever we went in Berlin we found everything to be of uniformly high quality, so is this some kind of holdover from Northern European Protestant mortification of the flesh? I’ve eaten those hot dogs from street vendors in London. I’ve eaten at that burger bar at Piccadilly bus station in Manchester. I’ve even had a Ginsters sausage roll. But nothing - nothing - prepared me for currywurst. A hideous, slimy, spongelike substance vaguely carved into a sausage shape but in no regard resembling any meat known to science and covered in a dollop of cheap chip-shop curry sauce, for some reason the currywurst holds a special place in the Berliner psyche. Think of it as the cultural equivalent of fish and chips if fish and chips were inedibly disgusting. They even have a museum of the curried sausage, for Christ’s sake.
I sometimes do stupid things and then blog about them in a jokey “I did this so you don’t have to” sort of way. I can only suggest you take my advice here deadly seriously. If you go to Berlin, ignore the blandishments of currywurst vendors.
To be frank, I was glad when I’d finished eating it.
Still, that was that. As we sat on the train to the airport the she-David asked me what I thought of Berlin and the things which immediately jumped out were the small details which make an impression: the fact that you can see the stars as there's so much less light pollution than London, or the way the city appears to operate on a small cash economy and few of the places we ate or drank wanted to take plastic or break a fifty, or even the daytime cookery show I saw which appeared to feature someone rapping whilst frying sweetcorn. Completely incomprehensible, but then I suppose that's how any German would feel about Ant & Dec.
It's impossible to really compare Berlin and London, because I live there and it's so close you can't be objective. Instead, I'd compare it to Paris. If you visit Paris, once you've wandered around for a bit it starts to feel like the place is being deliberately preserved as a monument to past glories. It's like the French have tried to pickle the city in aspic; by showing off the things which made Paris great once they hope some of that glory will rub off on the present. As a result Paris feels like a backward-looking place, and that's something it's impossible to say about Berlin. The difference, I suppose, is that the Germans know what the past looks like and they've no desire to revisit it. Instead they may not know what the future looks like but they're damn well going there, and you've really got to respect that.
*The she-David had expressly forbidden me from making jokes of the “Enemy toast ahead” sort before we set off, and wisely so knowing my inability to restrain myself saying stupid stuff at the drop of a hat.
*”Stick another Pfennig on baccy, Hans!”
Anyway, after leaving the dodgy heavy metal bar we strolled home up Karlmarxallee (the very name gave me a nosebleed) had a comparatively early night. Our hotel was quite a nice one (the staff, as everywhere, spoke perfect English and regarded my utterly hapless attempts to have a go at speaking German with polite resignation, just like pretty much everyone else I met) and thankfully there wasn’t a perfectly square bit of dirt on our bedroom window meaning that I dodged a potentially tricky situation.
We needed a comparatively early night as we had to be up and about the next morning – we were off to Potsdam and the trip was a good hour or two from where we were staying. Potsdam, if you haven’t heard of it, is, like Versailles, the sort of place you only get in countries where they’ve had an absolute monarchy. What happens, you see, is that one afternoon the Emperor thinks to himself “You know, I could really do with a salmon pink palace to go with my duck-egg blue palace”, and so he pops a pfennig on the price of an ounce of baccy and – hey presto! – before you know it the revenues are pouring in, construction on the ornamental gardens has begun, and all the nobles are scrambling to build themselves a little somewhere in salmon pink to keep in with the latest fad in palaces.
This compares to England, where the Monarch would go to Parliament and, wringing his crown in his hands in embarrassment, explain that the old palace had got some terrible leaks and the rain was getting in and would it be possible to get a few pounds to fix it up, and parliament would reply that if he didn’t want to be king there was a queue round the block of people willing to take the job if he wasn’t happy with it and he could be replaced like a shot. The upshot of this is that on the one hand Britain has fewer Potsdam and Versailles-like grandiose imperial follies, but on the other hand it still has a monarchy unlike all the pfennig-on-an-ounce-of-baccy types who never thought the good times would end.
Anyway, we had a light breakfast* and hopped on the train, where I was delighted to see several ruffians with study, heavily muscled dogs on short leads were already aboard and demonstrating that whilst I might have taken a break from Stevenage, its inhabitants were still with me in spirit. Our journey ran through old West Berlin and passed through an area called Wannsee, which I was deeply disappointed to note wasn’t twinned with Swansea. Missed a trick there, I thought.
Eventually we arrived in Potsdam town which, like much of Berlin (particularly the bits facing Russia), suffered terribly in the latter stages of the war but, once again like much of Berlin, is being comprehensively rebuilt in an almost exact reproduction of the old town. This entire project throughout the city simply never ceased to amaze me. Imagine, if you will, that the Luftwaffe had taken it upon themselves to level Edinburgh and maybe Bath as well, and the British set out to rebuild them just as they had been. It’s a project of that sort of scale and it is utterly fabulous. There’ll be a delightful chocolate-box church with several towers and bells ringing merrily inside them, and next to it there’ll be a little information board with a black and white picture of a forlorn pile of rubble which was taken in about 1947 which invites you to compare the before and after and – although nothing is ever directly said – also invites you to think very seriously about making sure nothing like that ever happens again.
The palaces and gardens are on the other side of town from the station so we strolled through Potsdam town, admiring the chocolate-box bits and ignoring the S.T.A.L.K.E.R-esque residential blocks that the communists had thrown up in that way they had which always suggests that when they said “To each according to his needs” what they reckoned people needed was 1500 calories a day, a jumpsuit, plenty of right angles and not many trees. These are thrown into sharp relief by the palaces and gardens which thankfully survived the fate of the Kaisers Palace in central Berlin. Built largely for the aforementioned Frederick the Great, they were the place where he came to hang out with his dogs and his special friends – he had another palace built on the other side of Berlin for the Empress and never spoke to her, which struck me as a very sensible arrangement for all concerned and one I might profitably learn from.
Although it’s possible to take tours, the she-David and I didn’t really have time as we had to get back to the airport and catch a plane, but as she scuttled off to powder her nose I entertained myself by surreptitiously eavesdropping on a group of startlingly stout tourists who had signed up for a tour and having discovered what was involved were engaged in a horrified, whispered conversation.
”Maisie-Bob! Maisie-Bob! He said the tour was going to take four hours!”
“Four hours of walkin’, Ellie-Jim? That’s whol’ year’s worth!”
“I know! Mah thaahs’ll chafe together somethin’ fierce!”
I couldn’t help but observe to myself as I waited that the stout people in the gardens were all tourists. Given how much the Germans appear to put away in the way of icecream and pretzels and sausages you would expect them to pork out to an impressive degree, but they seem to compensate pretty well by cycling everywhere.
We took a turn around the gardens, noting follies and fake temples and a lovely little tea-house, and then went around Sans Souci, a small, weekend palace of only 12 ornate rococo rooms which Frederick had built for himself and his closest chums** and which my GCSE French made me fairly confident in identifying as “Without Mice”, a situation much to be desired in a palace. Although the interior plumbing was lacking, Sans Souci is just the sort of place I could see myself taking myself off to for the weekend, and I couldn’t help but think it was a shame it’s not for hire.
Unfortunately time was against us. Time, tide and EasyJet wait for no man and we had to be back to the airport so it was back on the train to the city to collect our bags and, pausing for a bite to eat, I decided to have that staple of Berlin fast food, a currywurst. Stuffing it into my mouth I –
Jesus. Jesus. People actually eat this stuff? For pleasure? I mean, I actually took the time to buy it from one of the fancy riverside eateries so I at least expected the wurst to be in some way vaguely recognisable as a form of sausage. Wherever we went in Berlin we found everything to be of uniformly high quality, so is this some kind of holdover from Northern European Protestant mortification of the flesh? I’ve eaten those hot dogs from street vendors in London. I’ve eaten at that burger bar at Piccadilly bus station in Manchester. I’ve even had a Ginsters sausage roll. But nothing - nothing - prepared me for currywurst. A hideous, slimy, spongelike substance vaguely carved into a sausage shape but in no regard resembling any meat known to science and covered in a dollop of cheap chip-shop curry sauce, for some reason the currywurst holds a special place in the Berliner psyche. Think of it as the cultural equivalent of fish and chips if fish and chips were inedibly disgusting. They even have a museum of the curried sausage, for Christ’s sake.
I sometimes do stupid things and then blog about them in a jokey “I did this so you don’t have to” sort of way. I can only suggest you take my advice here deadly seriously. If you go to Berlin, ignore the blandishments of currywurst vendors.
To be frank, I was glad when I’d finished eating it.
Still, that was that. As we sat on the train to the airport the she-David asked me what I thought of Berlin and the things which immediately jumped out were the small details which make an impression: the fact that you can see the stars as there's so much less light pollution than London, or the way the city appears to operate on a small cash economy and few of the places we ate or drank wanted to take plastic or break a fifty, or even the daytime cookery show I saw which appeared to feature someone rapping whilst frying sweetcorn. Completely incomprehensible, but then I suppose that's how any German would feel about Ant & Dec.
It's impossible to really compare Berlin and London, because I live there and it's so close you can't be objective. Instead, I'd compare it to Paris. If you visit Paris, once you've wandered around for a bit it starts to feel like the place is being deliberately preserved as a monument to past glories. It's like the French have tried to pickle the city in aspic; by showing off the things which made Paris great once they hope some of that glory will rub off on the present. As a result Paris feels like a backward-looking place, and that's something it's impossible to say about Berlin. The difference, I suppose, is that the Germans know what the past looks like and they've no desire to revisit it. Instead they may not know what the future looks like but they're damn well going there, and you've really got to respect that.
*The she-David had expressly forbidden me from making jokes of the “Enemy toast ahead” sort before we set off, and wisely so knowing my inability to restrain myself saying stupid stuff at the drop of a hat.
*”Stick another Pfennig on baccy, Hans!”
