A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The Berlin Series:

• Berlin Day 1: Travel & Copenhagen
• Berlin Day 2: Brandenburg Gate-Reichstag-Checkpoint Charlie
• Berlin Day 3: Food Tour, East Side Gallery, and the Hasselhoff “Museum”
• Berlin Day 4: Museum Island, River Cruise, and the Ice Bar
• Berlin Day 5: Trip to Barsinghausen
• Berlin Day 6: Tempelhof Airport and Adjusted Travel Plans
• Berlin Day 7: Bonus Day in Berlin and Travel Home

Berlin Day 6 (March 16, 2023)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Next time: Bonus day in Berlin and travel home.

The Berlin Series:

• Berlin Day 1: Travel & Copenhagen
• Berlin Day 2: Brandenburg Gate-Reichstag-Checkpoint Charlie
• Berlin Day 3: Food Tour, East Side Gallery, and the Hasselhoff “Museum”
• Berlin Day 4: Museum Island, River Cruise, and the Ice Bar
• Berlin Day 5: Trip to Barsinghausen
• Berlin Day 6: Tempelhof Airport and Adjusted Travel Plans
• Berlin Day 7: Bonus Day in Berlin and Travel Home

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Berlin Series:

• Berlin Day 1: Travel & Copenhagen
• Berlin Day 2: Brandenburg Gate-Reichstag-Checkpoint Charlie
• Berlin Day 3: Food Tour, East Side Gallery, and the Hasselhoff “Museum”
• Berlin Day 4: Museum Island, River Cruise, and the Ice Bar
• Berlin Day 5: Trip to Barsinghausen
• Berlin Day 6: Tempelhof Airport and Adjusted Travel Plans
• Berlin Day 7: Bonus Day in Berlin and Travel Home

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Berlin Series:

• Berlin Day 1: Travel & Copenhagen
• Berlin Day 2: Brandenburg Gate-Reichstag-Checkpoint Charlie
• Berlin Day 3: Food Tour, East Side Gallery, and the Hasselhoff “Museum”
• Berlin Day 4: Museum Island, River Cruise, and the Ice Bar
• Berlin Day 5: Trip to Barsinghausen
• Berlin Day 6: Tempelhof Airport and Adjusted Travel Plans
• Berlin Day 7: Bonus Day in Berlin and Travel Home

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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