A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Paris Day One: Travel from Chicago to Copenhagen

by Leave a Comment

There was a time, not so long ago, when I had not been to Europe. For most of my life, I had barely been out of the country: the Canadian side of Niagara, just across the Texas line into Matamoros, and a couple of Caribbean cruise ports of call. Lately, however, my family has been making up for lost time. In 2017, we went to Rome and Florence; in 2022, we went to Lisbon and Porto; and in 2023, we went to Berlin. This year’s destination was Paris.

Taking these vacations is a privilege, but not so extravagant as I imagined before we started these travels. As a kid growing up in Indiana, European vacations seemed like something rich people did – or maybe the Griswolds after winning on Pig in a Poke. In part because Amy is such a good planner and has a super-power for finding bargain airfare, the overall cost isn’t too much different from domestic vacations. Going to theme parks or Las Vegas (but I repeat myself!) are probably more expensive once you get there.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that we have been giving our passports a workout. This time out, our trip to Paris began much the same as our trip to Berlin a year ago: Scandinavian Air from Chicago O’Hare to Copenhagen.

We didn’t have Cole for this trip. He plays for the Big Red Basketball Band, and opted to stay back to play the men’s Big Ten Tournament in Minneapolis. He drove Harper up from Bloomington on Friday and spent a couple of days with the house to himself, keeping the dogs company.

The drive to Chicago was kind of ugly – rain, traffic, construction. Spring in the Midwest. Once we were there, things were smooth. We even got into the lounge at the international terminal. We have a “Priority Pass” which gets us into some airport lounges.

In the sad little Chicago lounge waiting for our flight.

In the past, the one in Chicago has been too crowded. Priority Pass holders are a lower priority than some of the other categories of people with access. (This would crop up again in Copenhagen on our way back.) With respect to the Chicago lounge, we hadn’t been missing much. It’s kind of a dingy room with indifferent seating options. Still, it’s more comfortable than the gate, and you can get complementary beers and whatnot.

Waiting to board, we watched some of Indiana’s first round game in the women’s Big Ten tournament. The second quarter looked good. The Hoosiers got up pretty big over Michigan, but then collapsed in the second half. Mackenzie Holmes had been injured in the previous game and her playing time was limited. I guess it was good that we had to board the plane while the game was slipping away. No need to watch that!

The flight to Copenhagen was easy. After we got settled, the flight crew served a snack, and then I pretty quickly went to sleep for the bulk of the flight. Even though I have longish legs, I still recommend a window seat if you can manage it on an overnight flight. So much easier to sleep! It also helped that Amy and Harper were in the row in front of me – I wasn’t overly careful about whether my feet might poke out into their space.

Upon arrival, we checked into the Comfort Hotel next to the CPH airport. Total travel time from home to the hotel, including waiting around in the airport, was 15 hours.

We thought it was the same hotel we’d stayed at last year, but turns out that had been the Clarion. They are interconnected and both are accessible from the airport without going outside. I’ll give the edge to the Clarion in terms of room comfort, but both are perfectly fine. All of these facilities are also adjacent to the Metro stop. Extremely convenient.

On the train into downtown Copenhagen

Amy and Harper rested for a bit after we got there at about 1 p.m. local. Between a trip over to Chicago and a flight over a number of time zones (7, I think), my body didn’t have any real sense of what time it was. So, I went to the lobby for a beer. Eventually, we were ready to venture out into Copenhagen where we strolled around the Nyhavn area before returning to Restaurant Karla where we had such a good meal last year.

Strolling in Nyhavn

 

Outside Restaurant Karla

In Denmark, the currency is the Danish Krone. The conversion rate is maybe 1 USD to 7 DKK. I can do that kind of math in need but, but it’s not immediate, so we joke about paying with Itchy & Scratch Money. The bill was a little salty, but we didn’t really know how much it cost until it showed up on the credit card bill. Still, totally worth it. It’s a good place to eat.

I had an amber beer by Svaneke. I ordered a small one but the waiter jokingly guilted me into the larger one. Which is just as well. My metric conversions are a little rusty and the smaller one would have been about a half pint. Also, I like Danish modesty. There was an ad for Carlsberg that billed it as “probably” the best beer.

Raising a glass at Restaurant Karla

After dinner, we went home and crashed. Airplane sleep isn’t great quality, and we had an early flight to Paris in the morning. Of the three of us, I’m the more likely to be a troubled sleeper, but I had no trouble at all. Probably went to sleep at 8:30 p.m. and slept until 7 a.m.

View of Nyhavn

Amy and Harper in Copenhagen

Books of 2023

by 3 Comments

If I counted correctly, I read about 34 books this year. Some substantial, plenty just for a good read. Books beat just doom scrolling through social media – which I probably still do too much of. Here is the list:

  • Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest – Fernando Cervantes. This was a good one. A very readable history of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
  • Two Nights in Lisbon – Chris Pavone. I did not enjoy this one. A mystery where a woman’s husband disappears in Lisbon. He had a double life. I grew to actively dislike the protagonist and didn’t care what happened to any of the characters.
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson. Bryson is delightful. This was a re-read. Bryson starts with the Big Bang and goes from there.
  • Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Very creative new(ish) science fiction series. Humanity mostly dies out. There are spiders that evolve.
  • 1984 – George Orwell. We all know the book. Good to re-read from time to time. Newspeak is fascinating.
  • Children of Ruin – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sequel to Children of Time. There’s a third book that I have not yet read.
  • Travels With Charley – John Steinbeck. Steinbeck and his dog Charley circumnavigate the continental U.S. counterclockwise. That book inspired some blog posts. Here’s one.
  • The Big U – Neal Stephenson. Things get weird at an enormous university dormitory. This is Stephenson’s earliest work. It is not his finest work. He recognizes this. I’ve read that he only allowed continued publication because his fans were having to pay outsized prices on ebay to get copies.
  • The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop – Jonathan Abrams. I really enjoyed this one. It is, as the name suggests, a lot of the folks involved in early hip-hop giving their perspectives on what was going on at the time. One minor detail I hadn’t appreciated – the significance of skating rinks as early venues. They had space, decent sound systems, and were usually cheap.
  • River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile – Candice Millard. One of those histories about the outsized personalities of the people exploring the blank spots on the map.
  • Upgrade – Blake Crouch. Crouch writes a good sci-fi thriller. In this case gene editing has made a guy superhuman and hijinx ensue.
  • The Ice Pick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science – Sam Kean. The title tells the tale. A series of chapters telling the story of various misdeeds in the name of science. The title comes from the guy who would go to fairs and perform lobotomies with an ice pick.
  • From Property to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance – Sheila Kennedy and Morton Marcus. A bit of scholarship from a couple of prominent Indiana academics. A plain English discussion of social, legal, economic, and technological trends describing women’s progress from subordinates to (increasingly) equal members of society. It also describes the backlash we’re seeing to those developments.
  • Poster Girl – Veronica Roth. A science fiction book telling the story of a girl who was part of an elite ruling class, who was the face on propaganda posters. When she was young, the elites were overthrown and confined in a ghetto. A decade later, she goes out into the wider world and remains recognizable.
  • Unnatural History – Jonathan Kellerman. One of Kellerman’s Alex Delaware whodunit’s. A fun read, but I don’t remember too much about it.
  • Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage – Rachel Gross. A nonfiction book on the current state of women’s health and its history. The history of overlooking women’s health is almost laughably bad at times.
  • The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West – David McCullough. A history of the earliest settlers in the Northwest Territory – primarily around Marietta, Ohio.
  • The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America – Dean Snow. Ingram was a regular sailor who got marooned in Central America in 1568. Over the course of the next year, he and two other guys walked about 3,000 miles up to the coast of Maine where they were rescued. It was particularly good for giving a sense that what is now the U.S. was a bustling, fairly developed place prior to being ravaged by the diseases that came with contact.
  • Reacher: No Plan B – Lee Child. One of his Reacher action books. As per usual, Reacher is smarter, stronger, and faster than everyone else. The women love him and the bad guys fear him.
  • The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder – David Grann. A British ship, part of an effort to cause trouble for the Spanish, wrecks off the coast of South America, leaving survivors stranded on a desolate island in Patagonia. They don’t play nicely with one another. Members of the warring groups manage to get back to Great Britain and tell conflicting tales.
  • The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music – Dave Grohl. An autobiography by Foo Fighters front man, Dave Grohl. He seems like a good guy, and he has some stories to tell.
  • This Time Tomorrow – Emma Straub. Fiction about a woman turning 40, mostly focused on her relationship with her father. Time travel is a plot device. I liked this one a fair bit.
  • Pines – Blake Crouch. Crouch is a good author and this one was decent, but it wasn’t among my favorites of his work. An FBI agent comes to in a little town where he was doing an investigation. But things get weird and all is not what it seems.
  • Fairytale – Stephen King. King is at the top of the heap for a reason. He produces quickly and consistently. A kid helps a cranky old man and ends up finding a portal to a fantasy land that needs his help.
  • The 90s – Chuck Klosterman. A nostalgic recounting of the decade. Like any retrospective, it has to simplify. And, looking back always minimizes the things we were afraid of (because we survived them) and highlights the things that were cool or interesting (because the mundane isn’t worth mentioning.)
  • Light Bringer – Pierce Brown. The sixth installment of the Red Rising series. If you like that kind of science fiction, it’s a great series and Light Bringer was one of the stronger books.
  • John Dies at the End – David Wong. Kind of wacky, kind of gory. A surreal story that was funny but, if I’m honest, not one of my favorites.
  • A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over the Heartland and the Woman Who Stopped Them – Timothy Egan. While there are some details about the prior history of the Klan and some of the doings in other places, this is mostly an account of D.C. Stephenson and the rapid rise and fall of the Klan in Indiana. Very well told and right in my wheelhouse. Timely as well inasmuch as some of the social dynamics that let Stephenson thrive seem to be problematic once again.
  • Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth – Reza Aslan. A pretty interesting account of the historical life of Jesus, as near as we can tell.
  • Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan – Herbert Bix. This is one that I’m very happy to have read, but it was a bit like homework. The book spends a good amount of time on Hirohito’s upbringing and sets the stage with enough detail about the Meiji era as well as his father’s reign and how those informed the early part of Hirohito’s reign. One thing leads to another and, before long, Japan’s acquisition of chunks of China is proceeding apace. Then it has the tiger by the tail. Domestic politics were such that Hirohito and those in his circle didn’t see a way (and it’s not clear they had any appetite to do so in any event) to back away from imperial expansionism without support at home collapsing. They seemed to have kind of known that they had no clear exit plan once they attacked the U.S.
  • Termination Shock – Neal Stephenson. One of Stephenson’s more recent books. A Texas billionaire who made his money with Buc-ee’s style gas stations shoots a bunch of sulfur into the air in order to slow down global warming.
  • Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The story follows some of the stars of “hard action sports.” Basically death matches where individuals convicted of rape and murder are put in a reality TV, gladiator setting. If they survive long enough, they get their freedom. Mostly, they don’t. The story – particularly the footnotes – provides a lot of criticism of our own, actual prison system.
  • Lost in the Valley of Death – Harley Rustad. This has an “Into the Wild” vibe about it. Young man wanders around rather than getting a job. It doesn’t end well.
  • Boys from Biloxi – John Grisham. A Grisham page turner. It follows the lives of two kids from Biloxi who grow up into adults on opposite sides of the legal system.

Mayor Dennis Says His Goodbyes

by 2 Comments

Mayor John Dennis at podium

West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis says his farewells to the Tippecanoe County Commissioners.

At the Tippecanoe County Board of Commissioners meeting yesterday, West Lafayette Mayor, John Dennis, said his farewells to the Commissioners and other County officials present. It ended with hugs, and there were a lot of eyes that were no longer dry. John has been mayor for four terms, since 2007. Last year, he announced that he had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers and would not seek another term. Kind of underscoring the lack of partisanship in municipal government around here, John — a Republican — tapped his economic development director — Erin Easter, a Democrat — as his successor. She is unopposed in today’s election and will take office in January.

I have been in a number of meetings with Mayor Dennis over the past year and have not noticed his faculties slipping. I’m sure it is causing him problems, otherwise he would not have made the decision he did; but I’m very happy he was able to successfully serve the remainder of his term. And I hope he has good years ahead of him. But, there was an air of finality in his comments to the Commissioners. I believe he made similar comments to at a Lafayette City Council meeting last night.

To the Commissioners, he remarked on their long and productive work together. At times, I’ve had something of a front row to the collaboration between the mayors of Lafayette and West Lafayette and the Board of Commissioners. John and Lafayette mayor Tony Roswarski, go way back. They were both in the Lafayette Police Department together and, for a time shared a squad car. At times, they might as well be brothers. (The kind that like each other.) Their interaction with the Commissioners reflects genuine friendship and mutual respect. They don’t always have exactly the same vision, but usually it’s close enough and, regardless, there is a level of trust that each is pursuing what they see as the best interest of Tippecanoe County. None of them is prone to grandstanding. And each is willing to help the other where possible.

Mayor Dennis said:

“We have kicked some serious ass as elected officials over the past 16 years… And really a lot of people don’t understand how unusual it is for political bodies to have this type of relationship and respect for each other. Getting things done in an elected process is often the hardest thing to do… For us to get together and do things like change the entire dynamic of the county is pretty unique. And the way we did it was working together.

…

[Referring to himself and Mayor Roswarski]: We never planned to be the leaders of our hometowns. It just fortunately and thank God worked out that way. And more importantly, as leaders we were able to bring these communities together in a way unlike ever in its history. To make these two cities something that is not just been a gold mine and a diamond in the state of Indiana, but also in the country. If you look at any list that tells you where’s a hot place to live, where a hot place to get a job, where a hot place to make money, where a hot place to get an education. It’s Greater Lafayette and that’s both cities.

Particularly when compared to other parts of Indiana, our community has prospered. A lot goes into that other than the work of elected officials. But we have been awfully fortunate with the local officials we have in the County. Look around and there are no shortage of places where the best interest of the community gets derailed by petty personality conflicts. We have not had that among City and County officials. John Dennis is one reason for that good fortune, and I’ll miss having him as my mayor.

Doug’s Chili

by 2 Comments

I doubt anyone is coming here for the recipes, but I was asked for my chili recipe, and it will be easier to share this page than to text the recipe. Also,  I might want it here for posterity. If it helps out the wider world, then you’re welcome! It’s good stuff.

Ingredients:

1 pound ground beef

1 pound Italian sausage

2 packets McCormick Chili Seasoning (“Original”)

1 can (4 oz) green chiles (my preference is La Preferida but any will probably do).

1 can (15.25 oz) black beans

1 can (15.25 oz) kidney beans (my preference is the dark red)

2 cans (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes

1 can (8 oz) tomato sauce

1 onion

1 or 2 jalapeño(s)

Hot sauce (my preference is Frank’s Red Hot)

Worcestershire sauce

Instructions:

Chop up the onion and put it aside. Cut the jalapeño(s) in half, remove the seeds, and chop it up. Put it with the onion.

Brown the Italian sausage and ground beef in your chili pot. (Medium heat or lower). Once it is browned, mix it with the chili seasoning packets. Once that is mixed, douse it with Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce. I’ve never measured either of these things. I go heavier on the Worcerstershire than the hot sauce – several splashes of the former versus a couple of splashes of the latter.

Add the onions, jalapeños, and green chiles. Stir it in with the meat and let these cook for two or three minutes. (Make sure to stir fairly frequently – this is the point where the seasoning tends to get burned on to the pot if you let it sit too long.)

Add the black beans and kidney beans. Stir into the mix.

Add the diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. Stir into the mix.

Turn the heat up to medium-high and leave it on until the chili boils. Stir periodically.

After the chili has been at boil for ~5 minutes, cover the pot with a lid, turn the heat down to low, and let it simmer for 45 minutes or so. After that, if you’re not ready to eat yet, you can turn off the stove and let it sit. Reheat when you’re ready. (You can even put it in the refrigerator overnight and reheat the whole thing the next day).

Notes: This is pretty tough to mess up. Don’t worry too much about exact measurements. Some of the ingredients might not be very necessary. I’ve made it without hot sauce or jalapeños. I’m not sure how much work the Worcestershire is doing. I’ve used ground turkey instead of ground beef. The Italian sausage and the McCormick’s seasoning seem to be the linchpin.

Berlin Day 7 & 8: Bonus Day in Berlin and Travel Home

by 1 Comment

The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 7 (March 17-18, 2023)

Cozy accommodations

With our travel plans derailed by SAS, our final day of vacation (March 17) was planned on the fly. We took a car with our luggage to the Charlottenburg area of Berlin where we had a room at the B&B hotel. It was not at all roomy for four people, but I have to say that they make great use of the space. It reminded me of a cruise ship cabin in terms of efficiency. The kids had a bunk bed while Amy and I had a double. It didn’t matter too much since we wouldn’t be spending a lot of time here. During the day, we’d be out and about; then we’d have to head for the airport at about 3:30 a.m.

After storing our stuff, we got lunch on our way to see the Charlottenburg Palace. We ate at a restaurant called Trattoria Toscana. It was a fantastic place for lunch, but it was cash only which was a drawback. I’d been making an effort to burn our cash the day before because we hadn’t really needed many Euros for the prior week, and we thought we would be leaving a day earlier. Despite hearing that Berlin was a fairly cash intensive place compared to other parts of Europe, that hadn’t been our experience. I think that may have had to do with our spending most of our time in the central part of Berlin. In Charlottenburg, we saw more cash places. Anyway, we had enough for lunch, but just barely. We skipped the beer and wine that looked fairly appealing, and went with water (which still cost something, because that’s the way it goes in Europe.) The service was outstanding, and the food was good. No offense to the Germans, but I think the best food they have is from other traditions.

Understated and simple.

Following lunch, we made our way up the street to Charlottenburg Palace. My family loves a good palace. The palace was commissioned by Sophie-Charlotte at the end of the 17th century. This captured my interest since she features somewhat prominently as a character in one of my favorite series, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. He highlighted her relationship to Gottfried Liebniz who was an all around genius. One of the reasons I love the series is that Stephenson underscores just how much of our modern world in terms of things like science, industry, banking, economics, and communications were given form during the hundred years or so between 1650-1750. That appreciation fed into my enjoyment of Charlottenburg.

The palace itself is the scene of some of the activity in the story. The palace is baroque and busy and, we joked, has a lot of anterooms. “It’s anterooms all the way down!” My favorite part of the palace was the palace chapel which includes an impressive looking organ. Much as I enjoyed our tour, I probably would have preferred more information about the history of the palace residents and maybe less information about the furnishings. During the tour, I was stopped to take a survey about our visit, our reasons for coming, and our impression of the palace. Most of the survey was a matter of picking one of the pre-written answers, but there was a spot where you could offer any thought you wanted, and mine was out of left field. There was a great deal of Chinese imported or influenced material that struck me as dating from earlier than I would have expected much commerce. Not based on any real solid chronology, but I wouldn’t have expected too much of that until the late 1700s, early 1800s. But I think I was seeing Chinese themes from the early 1700s and I suggested that maybe they could provide information about Sino-Prussian relationships in the early 18th century.

Anterooms all the way down!

After a good long time in the palace, we exited onto the grounds. They were beautiful and impressive, but suffered (as any place at that latitude does) from it being mid-March. A few weeks later would have been stunning. At a pond with some ducks, Harper was having a great time and getting silly and giggly which, from my perspective as a Dad, is just the best thing ever.

Killer duck pond

After Charlottenburg, we took a break at Cafe la Mouche, got some coffee and spent the absolute last of our cash. Properly fortified, we made our way to the Computer Game Museum. As I recall, Amy and I were maybe a little low on energy. It had been an active week and the change in travel plans had thrown a wrench in the works. The Computer Game Museum is about 45 minutes away from Charlottenburg using public transit, and it seemed like a bit of a journey. Cole, in particular, however really wanted to go. And I’m glad we did because it was a great place.

Hanging in my WELL sweatshirt next to the Zork display.

I grew up with video games and video game hardware in the 70s and 80s which was really the focus of this museum. In addition to the exhibits and plaques, they have a couple of arcades and some of the exhibits are playable. I think we all had a good time. I played some old school Asteroids and Paper Boy. There was some trick to getting Pac Man to register credits that we never quite figured out, but eventually the kids were able to piggyback off of someone else who got the game going. Also, as luck would have it, I had my WELL sweatshirt on. I’ve been a member of that community for about twenty-four centuries. So, it was great to see a quote on one of the exhibits by Howard Rheingold (who goes by <hlr> on the WELL) at one of the exhibits.

After a couple of hours of video games, we were ready for dinner. Amy found us a Greek place nearby called Kos House. We walked the quarter mile down Karl-Marx-Allee to the restaurant. (And, yes, I included the name of the street because having a respectable street named after Karl Marx in the U.S. would be unthinkable!) One of our waiters spoke no English, and I’m not entirely sure his German was too strong. Cole sent the waiter running when Cole botched a German word or two. There were plenty of people who spoke English at the restaurant, but it was a good reminder that we were visitors. Cole and I both got Mythos beers. Not German, but neither of us had had it before. It was a pleasant lager. The whole family ordered gyros. Not terribly exotic, but maybe we were getting travel weary.

Fight!

Many of you can probably hear the Pole Position starting sounds right now.

Zelda on the big screen!

Following dinner, we headed back to the hotel to catch a few hours of sleep. It was probably 10 p.m. when we got to bed and the alarm was set for 3 a.m. There wasn’t an outlet near my side of the bed, so when I woke up in the middle of the night, my phone and watch were not within arm’s reach. I couldn’t get back to sleep because I kept wondering what time it was. Eventually, I got up and looked. It was 2:30. I had received a text from Mom that #1 seed Purdue had lost to #16 seed Farleigh Dickinson. (I come from a die-hard Hoosiers family, so Purdue falling on its face was a subject of some schadenfreude.)  I don’t think I got back to sleep after that. I let everyone know about the Purdue game first thing when the alarm went off. We had ordered a car that picked us up promptly – was, in fact, waiting for us – when we got down to the street at 3:45. We traveled to the Berlin airport. The security folks were unnecessarily gruff about their arbitrary rules for how many trays your computers and liquids and metal objects need to be distributed among. I guess they can be like that anywhere in the world.

There was no lounge we could use with our fancy-pants travel card, but it did get us a certain amount of credit at a particular cafe in the airport. We weren’t really all that hungry at that hour of the morning, so we weren’t coming anywhere close to maxing it out. This offended the sensibilities of the lady running the cash register, so she piled us up with extra candy bars and whatever was within arm’s reach that could get us closer to the limit. Cole and I both got breakfast beers, because who the hell knows what time it is anymore? We were following the late night (back home) IU versus Kent State game and were happy to celebrate that win.

Hoo-hoo-Hoosiers!

Our first leg was a short flight to Brussels. We were trying not to check bags but, claiming limited overhead space, they made us do so. I’m sure they had their reasons, but there was a *lot* of available overhead space. Once in Brussels, I think we had a two hour layover before the flight to Chicago took off, but between clearing passport control and a bonus passport check by United, they were boarding by the time we got to the gate. In Chicago, customs and baggage claim couldn’t have been easier. Our bags were some of the first ones out and were already on the carousel by the time we reached it. The guy at customs barely looked at us. Drove home and arrived at 4:30 p.m. local. The dogs were very happy to see us! Our total travel time had been a little over eighteen hours. Amy crashed at about 8:30 that night; I managed to stay awake until 11; and the kids had friends over until about 1 a.m. (Although Harper and Cole seem to have been dozing off on their guests from time to time.) It was good to sleep in our own beds.

Home again, home again jiggity-jig

Berlin Day 6: Tempelhof Airport and Adjusted Travel Plans

by 1 Comment

The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 6 (March 16, 2023)

Outdoor dining.

We once again got a late start, this time on account of our late return from Barsinghausen the night before. On today’s (Thursday, March 16) agenda was the Tempelhof Airport tour and some doner kebab. The weather was as nice as it had been all week. This was scheduled to be our last day in Berlin. While we were waiting for the kids to get going, Amy was checking information for our flight out on Friday. But it was odd. The information wasn’t showing up. She called the credit card benefits division through which we’d bought our flights. They agreed that something wasn’t checking out, but they’d have to wait until the American division of Scandinavian Air (SAS) was open. The U.S. was 5 hours behind us at that point, so it would have to wait until 1 or 2.

We ate the scraps left in the apartment for breakfast and then headed out. We stopped at a kebab place called Bistro Nazar which was a little trailer with maybe one outdoor table. Cole did the ordering for us. They asked if we wanted ketchup with the fries. He said yes, and they put a fair amount of it on top of the fries. It was a little sweet for my tastes, and in retrospect it would have been better just plain. But the kebabs were good. Amy found a place to mail some post cards while the kids and I hung out in the sun.

More or less across the street was an air lift monument. It’s an impressive concrete structure “reminiscent of a hungry hand reaching up.” Apparently there are identical monuments in Celle and Frankfurt. However, the area is not well maintained. There was graffiti on the monument and trash in the area. I was put in mind of the Captain Cook monument in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. But the comparison is probably not apt. The neglect of that monument pretty clearly reflects ill-will toward the monument and what it represents. I don’t think there is anything like that kind of hostility. Germans might have some mixed feelings about Americans, but the airlift was a pretty impressive feat. Soviets had cut off ground access to West Berlin for 322 days in 1948 and 1949. The Americans and the British performed the astounding feat of supplying the city from the air.

Not sure what “Rerum Cognoscere Causas” (“to know the causes of things”) has to do with the airport, but it looked cool.

The monument is near the entrance to Tempelhof Airport which was the site of our tour. The place stopped operating as an airport since 2008 and is just an immense, mostly unused structure surrounded by open space which has been devoted to public use. The site of the airport was originally Knights Templar territory (hence the name) and then a Prussian parade field. It then became a pre-war airfield, and Hitler had plans, never fully realized, to turn the place into a showpiece. The side by the runways and tarmac is shaped in a semi-circle where they were going to build stadium seating on the roof with an intended capacity of 100,000. On the opposite side, there were plans to install a sloped grass area that could accommodate another million.

Wide open spaces

There were also some political prison space there which pre-dated the Nazis but which they took advantage of until they had built more industrial facilities for that sort of thing. Armaments were manufactured there. The airport sustained some bombing damage during the war but maybe not as much as I would have expected – me not being a war planner or anything, but it seems like devastating an airfield would be a high priority. After the war, the Americans kept half and let the Germans use the other half. The Germans resumed commercial flights from Tempelhof. On the American side, there was apparently an attempt to create amenities that would limit the temptation to go out into the broader city. Cold War spying was rampant and the less Americans mixed with the general population the better. So, among other things, I appreciated the basketball court on one of the upper floors, complete with a “Berlin Braves” logo.

Berlin Braves

After the tour, we found a quiet space and Amy tried to deal with our flight situation. The original itinerary was to fly out of Berlin on Friday morning to Stockholm and then catch the flight from Stockholm to Chicago on Saturday. But the Stockholm – Chicago flight, SAS flight SK945 was just … gone. Nobody seemed to have much information about why or when. Supposedly an email had gone out, but when she was able to check, no email had been sent to Amy about this flight being canceled. It was made more difficult by having to go through the ticket vendor rather than straight through SAS. But the SAS person told the vendor maybe something about a strike. Trying to piece it together later, there doesn’t seem to have been a strike. They just sold us the tickets in January, and then – maybe sometime in February – eliminated the route from February 28 through March 21. And failed to tell us. We had no place to stay on Friday and, now, no way to get home. As Amy was trying to navigate this with the vendor, Tempelhof was closing down. She actually managed to stay on the phone as we worked our way through the U-Bahn and tram system. But, ultimately, this was mostly wasted time. Nobody was getting us on another flight. When we got home, Amy was able to fire up her laptop and make arrangements. We ended up with a “bonus day” in Berlin, a hotel room, and flights through a different airline via Brussels. And a big price tag. International travel on short notice for four people isn’t cheap. We tried to claw some of the money back from SAS and our travel insurance, but so far the results are limited. We’re ridiculously privilege to have this be an annoyance rather than a catastrophe.

Cole at the Hoffbrau Hause

When in Berlin

Fortunately, all of that was settled in time for us to head back out to dinner where we had reservations at the Hofbrau House. When we’d been planning the trip, this had been Cole’s request. I loved this dinner. But the place is not some kind of authentic local institution. The vibe was maybe a cross between Applebees and EPCOT. For all that, there was great energy. Wide open spaces with big picnic tables, servers schlepping beers, and a band playing polka. People at the various tables all seemed to be having a good time. The table next to us was doing a bunch of Jaeger shots. Along with the beer, I had sausages, sauerkraut and potatoes. It was delicious. Since we were right there at Alexanderplatz, we checked out the World Clock, built in 1969. It’s a 24 sided clock with a side for each time zone and it lists major cities in that zone. We also took in a pretty good view of the Berlin TV Tower, originally intended as a symbol of communist power. With the Cold War won and time having passed, the TV tower has a Jetsons/Venture Brothers/Carousel of Progress sensibility.

Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?

Another view of the TV tower.

We headed home. Cole and I thought we’d head out to one of the bars in the neighborhood for a beer. Amy was gassed from the stress of our travel snafu. Harper passed. So it was just me and the boy. The first place, I believe it was called Moloko, was just right. It was comfy and they had Zeppelin II playing on the stereo. Unfortunately, they closed at 10. Before and after Moloko, we had stuck our head into a place next door called Wohnzimmer. It was: a) too crowded; and b) not at all our vibe – fancy drinks and a hipper crowd. Still, we weren’t quite ready to be done, so we went to a Japanese restaurant called Oishinbo that was pretty close. That wasn’t great, so we tried one more which ended up being smokey and which we should have just skipped. Even so, it was nice to have some one-on-one time, shooting the breeze with Cole. A rare treat with him off at college. When we got back, we put the clothes we had been wearing out on the balcony to air out. There was a day when I was a lot more tolerant of bar smoke, but that day has definitely passed.

Hanging out with my boy.

Next time: Bonus day in Berlin and travel home.

Berlin Day 5: Trip to Barsinghausen

by Leave a Comment

The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 5 (March 15, 2023)

March 15 took us out of Berlin. When she was in high school, Amy became friends with a German exchange student. I had heard about him from time to time over the years, but mainly I remembered that he really liked Taco Bell. Amy gave him rides to and from school with Taco Bell stops en route. Sometime in 1996 or thereabouts, Amy took a trip to Germany and visited. After that, I don’t think there was a great deal of contact over the years. But, we were going to be in Germany, so she reached out and made plans to visit him in Barsinghausen, a village close to Hanover.

A street in Barsinghausen.

Our train didn’t leave until a little later, so we slept in before getting breakfast at a restaurant called Ewig Freunde. It was a little fancy for my breakfast tastes, but not bad. The server was friendly. Honestly, for all I like about Europe, I think breakfast is something the U.S. tends to do a little better. Properly fortified, we made our way to the central train station. “Hauptbahnhof” (main train station) was one of the few German terms I actually picked up during our trip. Once again, train travel is something that America just doesn’t do very well. We covered the approximately 170 miles from Berlin to Barsinghausen in a couple of hours. I can’t imagine trying to get from Lafayette to, say, St. Louis, via public transport without a lot more time, hassle, and expense. Our trip was smooth and uneventful. Got on the train, settled in a bit, wandered up to the restaurant car, grabbed a couple of beers, and enjoyed the ride.

Amy’s friend picked us up at the station which was less than a mile from his house. I like the tourist places, but just hanging out with some new people was a nice change of pace. Amy delivered a gift of Girl Scout Cookies by way of greeting. She had spent a good bit of time trying to think of something that was portable, American, not easily available in Germany, and that our hosts (and their kids) would enjoy. Hit the nail on the head, I thought.

The friend’s wife’s native language is Russian and German is her second language. She was worried about her English, but it was fantastic. Their seven year old, who doesn’t speak any English, quickly adopted Cole and wrangled him into playing chess, some kind of train building set, and video games. Cole took four or five years of German in high school. He’s not at all fluent, but he knows a fair bit. Still, whenever he’d start a conversation in German, the kind and/or efficient German listener would immediately shift to English. Here was an audience who wasn’t going to short-circuit Cole’s German! Cole said there was a fair amount he didn’t understand, but they both seemed to communicate well; and it was fun to watch. There is some legitimate criticism about Americans not learning other languages. But, in fairness, it’s a whole different dynamic when you live in a country the size of a continent where you are unlikely to encounter very many people who speak other languages and in a world where your language has become one of the defaults. Learning new languages simply doesn’t have the same utility for most Americans as it often does for people living in other places. If people in Ohio spoke a different language, I might be apt to pick up a little Buckeye because it would be useful.

The Masson kids establishing dominance.

After hanging out a bit, chatting, and enjoying some baked goods, we took a walk around the neighborhood and paused for a good while at the local soccer field. Cole and Harper mostly took on the seven year old who stood in goal. The kid had some good keeper instincts! Just the way he’d go to ground for the ball was a lot more fluid and natural than what I ever saw in my rec soccer kids, particularly at that age. My guess is that’s the influence of starting the sport early and having it on TV in a big way. Kids in the U.S. probably have a more intuitive grasp of some of our big sports just from it permeating the culture. There was one moment where the ball kind of got away from Cole and he ripped a hard shot into the top of the net. If it had been a little lower, there might have been injuries. Rather than tragic, it ended up being funny. Cole big footing the seven year old to show dominance.

Beer, glorious beer. So frosty and delicious!

After our walk, it was time for dinner. They made us some spectacular goulash with German noodles. This was probably my favorite meal of the week. Amy’s friend had also laid in a nice selection of beer. I don’t think that’s normally what he had around the house, but they were putting on the dog for us as guests; which was really kind of them. He sent us home with a few of the beers which were nice to have at the Airbnb. After some dessert and a little more conversation, we said our goodbyes and headed back to the train station. Once again, the public transport was great. We navigated a combination of inter-city train, S-bahn, and tram, returning to the apartment at about 1 a.m. Without a lot of tourist stops, there maybe wasn’t as much to write about, but getting to visit with real people in a different country is a rare experience for us, and I’m glad we were able to do it.

Next time: We visit the Tempelhof Airport and our flight home disappears.

Berlin Day 4: Museum Island, River Cruise, and the Ice Bar

by Leave a Comment

The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 4 (March 14, 2023)

March 14 was a relatively more leisurely day than the previous several days. We’d been going pretty hard, so that was fine. We slept in a little, had our meager breakfast of yogurt and leftover snacks, and made our way to Museum Island. It’s an island in the River Spree in the central part of the city with six museums: Altes (Old), Neues (New), Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery), Bode, Pergamon, and Humboldt Forum. There’s no way to cover it all in one go, so we settled – somewhat arbitrarily – on the Pergamon and the Neues Museums.

Harper between some pilfered lions.

The Pergamon contains artifacts obtained during a period of time when the looting of other people’s stuff by European powers was particularly vigorous. I’m sure someone has done a study and offered social commentary on this, so I’m perfectly prepared to be wrong, but I think the acquisitiveness in this area was a combination of the rise of an academic-scientific mindset in the West, Germany looking for its place in the sun, and a decline in the Ottoman Empire. I kept thinking of the time and place where Raiders of the Lost Ark was set – although, a lot of the acquisition at the Pergamon would have been pre-Nazi. The Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon were especially striking to me. The Ishtar Gate was excavated between 1904 and 1914 and put on in display around 1918. It was apparently shipped out of the Middle East more or less in secret and its reconstruction was one of the more complicated architectural reconstructions in archaeological history.

Gates of Ishtar. “Telling the truth can be dangerous business.” (There is maybe one person who will get that reference.)

Miletus was a Greek city on the west coast of Anatolia that was eventually abandoned (in the 1400s?) when its harbor silted up. The Market Gate was built around 200 AD and destroyed about 800 years later. The Germans excavated it at the beginning of the 20th century and shipped it up to Berlin where the fragments they recovered were mixed with new construction to create the display at the Pergamon.

Market Gate of Miletus

After making our way through the Pergamon, we had lunch at the Cu29, a restaurant at the museum complex. It was a little pricey, but the beers were tall, and the food was good. (I went with more currywurst). Cole joined me in having a pilsner. College kids, am I right? The most entertaining part was a robot waiter with a cat display for a face. It would periodically declare, “meow.” A cat seems like a really bad choice for a waiter though. They could have added some realism by programming it to arbitrarily go up to people and knock stuff off their tables.

Our Robot Cat Waiter

Our second museum for the day was the Neues. The museum is “new” only because the Altes was built thirty years earlier. Its main draw is its Egyptian artifacts. The star attraction is the bust of Nefertiti of which they’re pretty serious about not allowing guests to take pictures. It’s an image I’d seen in any number of history books over the years. Nefertiti was the wife or consort of Akhenaten who was significant in trying to initiate a monotheistic religion around the sun god Aten. The bust on display is believed to have been created about 3,300 years ago. Which is, I don’t need to tell you, a long time ago.

We cut our visit to the Neues a little short because we had a river cruise scheduled. While the weather had been mostly decent all day, the sun even gracing us a couple of times, it started to turn ugly about the time our cruise was starting. Cold, heavy rain. It’s a cruise up and back along the River Spree, looking at the historic district of Berlin. The best way to enjoy the tour would have been on top of the boat where the views were better. But, the below decks had plenty of seats and tables with windows and a little cafe/bar.

Actually, the sequence of events was that we settled into the below deck table, got some beers (Berliner Kindl Pils), and enjoyed ourselves for a bit. However, enough people were up top, and the views were limited enough out the windows below, that we were briefly lured upstairs. We couldn’t have been up there more than two minutes before the rain really started to let loose. We went back downstairs and reclaimed our table. The top deck was closed for the remainder of the tour. We didn’t miss a great deal because we’d seen a lot of what there was to see on the river cruise during our previous two days in town.

Ridin’ the Storm Out

While we were there, we encountered another family from Indiana. Hoosiers generally travel pretty well. However, despite Cole and I wearing IU gear as Hooser beacons non-stop the whole week, I think that was the only Indiana encounter we had while we were in Berlin. (A couple of times when people would ask where we were from, I’d say something like “Indiana – United States. It’s near Chicago.” I don’t know how familiar anyone would necessarily be with the geography of the United States, but Chicago is a pretty solid reference point).

When the cruise let out, the weather was really bad. It was the first time we had to break out the umbrellas. But the wind was whipping and the temperature was getting close to the freezing point. Dinner wasn’t for another couple of hours. There was an “ice bar” not too far away. We had intended to go there after dinner, but walking anywhere else at that point seemed like a bad idea.

Cole and Harper at the Ice Bar

The Berlin Ice Bar is a cheesy, touristy kind of thing, but it was a lot of fun. You wait in a regular bar until your group is up, then they give you coats and gloves and take you into a cold room, decorated in an arctic theme, and serve you drinks in a glass made of ice. During the wait, the kids and I all got “Desperado” beer, a Mexican beer with a tequila flavoring. Add a lime to it, and it’s a sweet, tasty drink. Harper especially liked that one. In the ice bar, two drinks came as part of the package. You could get beers or a variety of shots. One issue was that, because you were getting a glass made of ice, you only got one. So, if you wanted a beer and a shot, you had to get the beer first – because your beer wasn’t going to fit into a shot glass. I’m not sure exactly what my rationale was, but for my second drink, I got a shot of vodka. I haven’t had a shot of vodka in probably a decade, and I don’t especially like it (it’ll probably be another decade before my next one), but something about the icy set up made me think it was appropriate. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t too terrible.

Sporting the IU gear everywhere we went.

We cut the ice bar maybe a little shorter than we would have otherwise because we had dinner reservations at YOSOY, a Spanish tapas restaurant. Fortunately, by the time we got out of the ice bar, the weather had cleared up so that we didn’t need our umbrellas and had a pleasant walk. The food was decent. I kind of liked the energy of the place – fairly tight quarters with a lot of people. But if I had to choose a least favorite dinner on the trip, that was probably it. On our way home, we swung by the Ampelmann Shop. The Ampelmänchen is “the stop light man.” In addition to being cute on his own, he’s notable for being one of the relatively few East German cultural things that the West Germans adopted when the country reunified. There’s a shop devoted to trinkets with him on there, and we picked up – among other things – a Christmas ornament. Amy had the excellent inspiration several trips ago to get ornaments while we travel. That way, we can remember our various trips when we decorate the tree.

We ended the day by returning home and watching TV. We have a couple of shows that we started watching as a family. With Cole away at college, we have to wait until we’re reunited to catch up on episodes. In this case, we had a final episode of “Mythic Quest” to watch. And, because season 3 of Ted Lasso was premiering the next day, we also re-watched the last episode from season 2. (We didn’t end up watching any of season 3 on our trip.) Honestly, as much fun as I had doing all the stuff, I enjoyed just hanging out and watching TV with the whole family as much as any of the other stuff.

Next time: Trip to Barsinghausen to see Amy’s friend from high school.

Berlin Day 3: Food Tour, East Side Gallery, and the Hasselhoff “Museum”

by Leave a Comment

The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 3 (March 13, 2023)

March 13 was Monday which meant that stores were open. Markets are mostly closed on Sundays. We felt like we should have some supplies for the Airbnb where we were staying, so Amy and I went out to forage before the kids woke up. We had a little success, but not much. The places that were close (at least the ones we managed to identify) were not very big. It was a damp, cool morning, but even so, taking a stroll in a new place is always interesting. I felt like there was a sort of uniformity to the buildings in the area where we were staying: lots of 5-6 story buildings packed together in grids. The businesses were varied, but if there was variation in the architecture, it didn’t jump out at me.

Behold the döner kebab!

We had a food tour scheduled for lunchtime. The ones we did in Lisbon and Porto last year were really fun ways to get someone local to tell you about the city and, obviously, the food. I think I prefer dinner to lunch, but the dinner options had been booked by the time we scheduled ours. We rousted the kids, fed them some of the yogurt we’d managed to scavenge, and made our way to the Mitte area of Berlin. The meeting place was on the Friedrichs Bridge. We were to look for the woman with an orange umbrella. Nobody with that description was on the bridge. A guy with a fantastic mustache asked if we were there for the tour. He was another guest scheduled to be with the group, and we were all happy to be in the right place. Mel and his wife were from Detroit and had extended their trip to Europe another day to visit Berlin. A couple from Salt Lake City was also on the bridge and were part of our group. After not too long, the lady with the umbrella showed up and apologized for being late. Our guide was Donya? She was a student from Syria who had been doing this for about three months.

Another couple, Bernie and Crystal, were the last to arrive. Their taxi driver had gotten lost. An exchange made it clear that Mel recognized Bernie but I was far enough away from them that I couldn’t tell how or why. Later on, Bernie mentioned something about becoming “involved in professional athletics” when he was younger. That was enough for me to just ask him directly what sort of athletics. Turns out Bernie was Bernie Williams, all-star Yankee center-fielder who, among other things, holds the Major League Baseball post-season record for RBIs. As it happens, Bernie is also a professionally trained jazz guitarist. A musician friend described him as “the real deal,” and not just “good for a former athlete.” Crystal runs an outfit called Gator Cases which makes guitar cases, cases for other types of instruments, and various music accessories.  So, despite hanging out with a baseball legend, our conversation focused a lot more on music and band. It was fun watching Cole drinking beers and talking music school and composition with these folks.

Food tours in foreign cities are the way to go. The don’t always include world-famous baseball players; but sometimes they do!

I didn’t note the name of the first restaurant we went to, but we had döner kebabs, and if I’m reading the geotagging on my pictures correctly, the place was called Mustafa Demir’s Gemuse Kebap. And it was fantastic. Aside from the goulash at Amy’s friend’s house, it was the best thing I ate all week. Our guide told us that these döner kebabs were created by Turkish immigrants who adapted traditional kebabs to German sensibilities by putting them into a pita that could be eaten more efficiently. If I have a complaint about the tour, it was that not much thought was given to water or other drinks to accompany the sandwich. (One of my few complaints about Europe in general is that water doesn’t generally accompany meals in restaurants unless you pay for the fancy bottled stuff.)

On our way to the next stop, our guide took us through Haus Schwarzenberg, an alley bursting with street art and murals. This was Harper’s favorite spot on the trip. Per the Atlas Obscura entry on the site, “Since street art is mercurial and chaotic by its very nature, the art on display in the alley next to Haus Schwarzenberg changes on an almost weekly basis, with new pieces being painted on, papered over, added to, and repurposed in the constantly evolving collage that washes over this little urban oasis. Famous street artists like El Bocho, Miss Van, Stinkfish, Otto Schade, and more have been known to add to the churn. The alley also features a famous painting of Anne Frank by Jimmy C that remains intact and untouched.”

Next up was currywurst at Curry 61. Don’t get me wrong, this is my kind of food. But, at the end of the day, it was more or less hotdogs in spicy ketchup. There wasn’t much space inside the restaurant, and we kind of crowded around a stand up table already occupied two or three patrons. One woman kept shaking her head as if annoyed by us, but it’s possible she just had a tic. We washed down the currywurst with a berliner from Samy’s Berliner Donuts. It was good, but by this time we were getting pretty full and thirsty. So, the next stop was notable not so much for the food as the wine. I believe the place was Weihanstephaner and the food was something like fancy mac & cheese. Judging by the amount of food left behind, that was probably the least favorite stop for the group.

The good news is that we all had pretty full stomachs for the beer tasting that came next at Das Lemke. Amy signed us up for the upgraded drinks package which, in retrospect, wasn’t really necessary for Harper. It came with flights of beer: a bohemian pilsner, the original (a Vienna style lager), a weizen, a pale ale, an IPA, and a berliner weisse. I’m not snobby about my beer by any means, but I don’t much care for wheat beers. Being a dutiful child who eats his vegetables first, I cleared out the berlinerweisse and the weizen so I could focus on the other beers. Cole cleared his away pretty readily, and we both helped out a bit with Amy and Harper’s. But, it was early afternoon, and we had stuff to do; so we were not members of the clean plate club – or clean pilsner club, I guess. It was here that the kids spent a good amount of time talking to Bernie and Crystal which, as I mentioned, made for fun listening.

Harper at the East Side Gallery. This might be my favorite picture from the vacation.

We mentioned that our next stop after the food tour was the East Side Gallery. Bernie and Crystal wanted to see that spot and were not yet familiar with the public transport system. They asked if they could follow us. “I mean … sure. But, please join us!” So they did. The Gallery is a series of murals on the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. “In the spring of 1990, after the opening of the Berlin Wall, this section was painted by 118 artists from 21 countries. The artists commented on the political changes of 1989/90 in a good hundred paintings on the side of the Wall that was formerly facing East Berlin. Due to urban development measures, it is no longer completely preserved, and instead of the originals from then, only the replicas from 2009 exist today.” One of the most famous is “My God, Help Me to Survive this Deadly Love” which depicts former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker, an East German leader. The whole site is pretty remarkable, capturing the spirit of 1990 when the Wall came down.

Sunset on the Spree

Toward the end of our tour of the murals, we parted ways with Bernie & Crystal, and took it easy, looking out over the River Spree. We caught the tail end of some singers performing on the river walk and the sunset. Just beyond the East Side Gallery was the Wall Museum which provides some good history of the rise and fall of the wall. I think I liked it especially for its video of a live Pink Floyd performance of “the Wall” on July 21, 1990 at Potzdamer Platz.

Burgermeister!

Dinner was at a Burgermeister, and it was fantastic. A terrific burger with beers sold out of a shack under an elevated railway bridge. My kind of place! We ate outside, standing up at a table. It’s no secret that I like lowbrow places, and this fit the bill. Properly fed, we headed for the last stop of the evening: the David Hasselhoff Museum. Trouble was, about twenty minutes into our subway journey to the destination, I realized I’d left my backpack under the table at the Burgermeister. So, we headed back but without a ton of hope. The place had been pretty busy, and there was no reason for a person not to walk off with it. There was nothing in the pack that  I couldn’t live without, but we’d miss the umbrellas and a hat I had in there. The biggest loss probably would have been my traveler’s notebook where I keep my notes for these trips along with keepsakes like tickets and a little bit of money. When we got back, there was nothing under the table. I asked a guy at the window of the shack, but his English wasn’t very good (and my German is non-existent.) But his face brightened when I made the gesture for putting on a backpack. Sure enough, someone had turned it in! No harm, no foul. In fact, all of our moods were brightened by the unexpected victory.

My family gathers around the Hoff!

Retracing our steps, we made our way back toward the Hasselhoff Museum. Calling it a “museum” is overstating things in a big way. It’s half of a hallway in the basement of the Circus Hostel – not to be confused, like we did, with the Circus Hotel across the street. The Atlas Obscura entry on the site explains, “What started as a perhaps tongue-in-cheek shrine to the former Baywatch and Knight Rider star has evolved into a full-blown one man museum celebrating the legend, his music and acting career, and of course his longstanding love affair with the once-divided city.” Even if it’s small, it’s mighty. It has a mural of the Hoff and some memorabilia. Hostel management has asked that the street outside be named David-Hasselhoff-Strasse.  Probably my favorite display was a magazine with a bold cover asking “Did David Hasselhoff end the Cold War? Facts You Need To Know: HE DID.”

Properly educated, we called it a night and headed home.

My own picture with the man who ended the Cold War.

Next time: Museum Island, a River Cruise, and the Ice Bar.

Berlin Day 2: Brandenburg Gate-Reichstag-Checkpoint Charlie

by Leave a Comment

The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 2 (March 12, 2023)

Airports are beyond time. We made full use of the 7:30 a.m. self-serve breakfast bar.

Amy set her alarm for 5:30 a.m. and we were set for an early start on Sunday morning (March 12 if you’re keeping score). Harper is usually our weakest link at such moments, but she’d slept in her clothes, hadn’t even opened her bag, and got out of bed reasonably easily. Having stayed at the Copenhagen airport Clarion, we were literally right next door. That was super convenient. No trams, no taxis, nothing. Just walk next door and into the terminal. (There was some construction underway or else we wouldn’t have even needed to go outside.) One of the perks of what we call our “fancy pants travel credit card” is lounge access in a lot of airports. The Carlsberg Aviator Lounge in Copenhagen is a good one. (I’d give it a backseat to the lounge in Lisbon, but that one is hard to beat.) Cole took full advantage of the 7:30 a.m. self-serve beer station. I didn’t entirely avoid it myself. Time is just a construct, particularly when you’re dealing with airports and time zones.

An incidental moment I enjoyed at the lounge was what I took to be a grandfather interacting with his grandchildren. Nothing special, I don’t suppose. Just a guy who seemed to be having a great time eating and goofing around with his little grandkids on a trip.

The flight to Berlin from Copenhagen was short and easy. Maybe an hour. A driver picked us up at the airport and, en route, pointed out the Tempelhof Airport. He’d seen a video about it. We were excited because that was on our list of places to go later in the week. We rested for a bit when we got to the Airbnb at Schliemannstraße 17 in Berlin. I’d gone my entire life not knowing what that “ß” meant. Turns out it’s an “eszett” more or less a double “s.” Handy to know, since they’re all over the place in Berlin! The Airbnb was a nice two bedroom set up on the fourth floor. Aside from the broken elevator, the only drawback was a single bathroom. We had no cause to complain since it was clear up front that’s what the place had available. But, it did present a bottleneck at various times during the vacation.

We settled on a Portuguese cafe on the block, Bekarei, as a good place for lunch. The sandwiches were good and, bonus points, they had Super Bock available. (In fact, I’d ordered a Sagres since that’s what they had on display. They only had Super Bock available, would that be “ok?” Of course! When we’d been in Portugal last year, we had settled into being a Super Bock family.)

I, like John Wick and several others, have been to the Brandenburg Gate.

Our first “official” Berlin stop was the Brandenburg Gate. We had purchased the Berlin city card which included basically unlimited public transit for the week. Now we had to figure out how to use it. Google has made this sort of thing so much easier than it probably was in the past. Tell it where you want to go, and you’ll get appropriate combinations of tram, U-bahn, S-bahn, and what have you. The public transport is light years better than anything I’ve seen in the States. We were tourists going to touristy places, so that no doubt helps, but there was transport going everywhere we wanted to go. There wasn’t much waiting around. And everyone was using it. In the U.S., bus routes involve a lot of waiting, and it’s mostly just people who have no other options.

It was no problem at all to figure out the tram and the train that would get us to, if memory serves, our stop was the Unter de Linden station which was right next to the Brandenburg Gate. The Gate, like Berlin, has a complicated history. From connotations of peace to a triumphal symbol of conquest and victory to the site where East faced off against West during the Cold War to a place where an American family can now casually go for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a cool looking structure, but often I don’t know what to do when I get to such places. Snap a few pictures, think about the people who had been there before you, and move on, I guess.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Nearby was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which is an impressive installment. It is a large area covered with a grid of concrete slabs on sloping ground. I don’t know how to describe it, but it definitely got me into my head and in a reflective mood as I made my way among the taller slabs that envelope you among the undulating ground levels. As I made my way in no particular direction, I’d see my family members and other people at the site. Those encounters took me briefly out of the reflection before I was dropped right back in. The Reichstag is visible in the skyline above. One thing that impressed me in several parts of Berlin were plaques and whatnot that declared in no uncertain terms that Germany and the Nazis had been beaten and surrendered unconditionally and that they had committed atrocities such as murdering Jews and other groups. My sense was this is an effort to limit – as much as is ever possible – “Lost Cause” and “Stabbed in the Back” narratives from taking root. Failure to deal with “Lost Cause” narratives continues to plague the United States as Southern Whites were allowed to continue believing that their ancestors were engaged in something more defensible than Treason in Defense of Slavery; meanwhile, the “Stabbed in the Back” narrative obviously contributed to fascists taking power in Germany after World War I, pretending that they would have won the war if only Jews and other disfavored groups hadn’t been insufficiently patriotic.

Inside the Reichstag Dome. We’re reflected in the mirror.

Next, Amy had made us reservations for a walk up the Reichstag Dome. The historical enormity of this structure is also hard to articulate. Arson at the site in the 1930s allowed the Nazis to take total control of the State. The War further destroyed the site. The Cold War made its reconstruction, let alone use as a German center of government, improbable. The Wall coming down, German reunification, re-location of government in Berlin, reconstruction of the Reichstag, and construction of the dome are a fairly profound symbol of rebirth. According to the Wikipedia page, “The futuristic and transparent design of the Reichstag dome is intended to symbolize Berlin’s attempt to move away from a past of Nazism and instead towards a future with a heavier emphasis on a united, democratic Germany.Specifically, it symbolizes that the people are above the government, as was not the case during Nazism.”

There was a lot to admire about the dome, but I was really taken by the mirror on the stem going up to the dome which reflected the people walking around the ramps very clearly. I don’t know what kind of wizardry is involved, but it’s impressive. Down at the base of the dome is a series of plaques that walk you through the history of the place.

Fun Fact: Otto Von Bismarck has a monument nearby. “Hey! That fact wasn’t fun at all!”

After the Reichstag, we had a parting of the ways. Harper and Amy were interested in a coffee and a bit of a rest. Cole and I kind of wanted to walk the 1.25 miles or so to the Victory column. We did not make a bee line. Rather, we were distracted by the Soviet War Memorial and the Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart memorial in the Tiergarten. From a purely American perspective, the Soviet War Memorial is kind of bonkers. They’re the bad guys, right? Does nobody remember the documentary, Red Dawn? But it’s a testament to the complicated history of the place. For all of their own atrocities, the Soviet people were wronged by the Nazis. The Soviets controlled the area and erected a monument to the sacrifices and achievements of their people. Part of the German de-Nazification project involves recognizing that they were bad actors in WWII. And, so, you have Soviet tanks on the way to a Prussian monument.

The monument to the musicians is tucked away a little bit. We were walking the path and saw something shiny off to the side which turned out to be the Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart memorial. Cole joked about how their music seems to be the only “real” music in the eyes of the Jacobs School of Music where he’s currently studying. (Hyperbole, I’m sure.) It was apparently commissioned in 1904 by Kaiser Wilhelm, suffered a lot of damage during the War, and restored in 2007.

By and by, we made our way to the Victory Column. It’s an impressive structure in the middle of a traffic circle. I guess it has symbolized various things over the years, but Prussian military prowess and defeat of various European adversaries seems to be the main purpose. One cool feature is that it has tunnel access from the four corners of the intersection. Amy and Harper had taken a bus there but, with no obvious cross walks hadn’t figured out how to access the circle until Cole and I popped out of a tunnel. Once again, as a tourist, I’m never entirely sure what to do with these things. I look at it, admire the structure, snap a few pictures, and then go on to the next place. I’m not exactly speed running the sites, but I don’t know how deeply any of it is penetrating either. That said, if it’s an excuse to spend time with my family, it’s probably worthwhile.

Checkpoint Charlie has this banner with Soviet and American soldiers opposite each other.

Next up, Checkpoint Charlie and its museum. The area itself is a street with a guard shack in the median and posters of American and Soviet soldiers hanging above. Back in the day, after East Germany put up the wall to keep its citizens in, this crossing point at the border was a symbol of the Cold War. Now it’s a street where I almost got hit because I was looking at the poster rather than watching out for traffic. There would have been some irony in getting hit by a car at that spot in the world. We went into the adjacent museum, and it is *dense*. This does not seem to be the work of professional historians. It’s informative, but a bit random. And there’s no real narrative that I could discern. But Ronald Reagan’s hat was there! Our family had mixed opinions on the museum. I think the kids ended up liking it better than the adults. Nerds!

Enjoying a nightcap with comfy seats, soccer on the television, and complementary use of the facilities.

We had a well earned dinner at a place called Maximilians. It was good but not great. I had some trout, and Cole and I both had large beers. One thing about being an older man and a beer drinker is that one is well-advised to take advantage of a bathroom when the opportunity presents itself. Cole skipped that opportunity and quickly came to regret it as we made our way home. It was going to involve some time and train rides. The boy was in pain, and Berlin doesn’t have the number of public restrooms you might expect in a city so large. Eventually, we made the decision to stop in a restaurant and get more drinks so that we could be paying customers, entitled to use their facilities. I’m not sure if it was the Titanic hotel or the Pascarella restaurant where we landed, but there is a really comfy bar in between where we set up shop. It has nice seats, tables, and couches. Soccer was playing.. It was really a happy bit of spontaneity. (Amy had us so well planned that we joked about putting spontaneity on the schedule.)

At that point, we’d run ourselves pretty hard, and it was time for bed. I woke up in the middle of the night freezing. At the time, I thought it was just cold in the room. But in retrospect, it may have been a bit of a fever I didn’t know I had. Whatever it might have been was gone by morning.

Next time: food tour, East Wall, and the Hasselhoff “Museum”