Tag Archives: berlin wall

Portland, Maine

I stayed at the Inn at St. John in Portland, Maine. It’s a well-maintained Victorian building that’s been a hotel continuously since 1897. It’s so old that it still uses metal keys.

I followed my usual well-formed plan of wandering around and looking at things.

As I was wandering, I happened across the Lobsterman statue that’s mentioned in Roadside America. It’s really more notable for its history. As maritime-themed statues go, it can’t compare to the seal-gutting statue in Copenhagen.

I also saw the Berlin Wall, previously seen in Berlin.

At the top of the hill in downtown Portland is an observatory that was built in 1807 by an entrepreneurial sea captain who set up an annual subscription service to notify ship owners when their ships were arriving. That sounded interesting, so of course it was closed for the season.

The following morning was cold and rainy with high winds, but I still walked over a mile to visit the International Cryptozoology Museum. I could have driven, but I had a good parking spot and I didn’t want to lose it.

The Cryptozoology Museum takes a very broad approach to cryptozoology. There are your serious cryptids (Bigfoot, chupacabras), the “intersection of cryptozoology and popular culture” (Godzilla, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Creature from the Black Lagoon), hoaxes and fakes (jackalopes), animals thought to be extinct that later turned out not to be (coelacanths), animals that really are extinct (mastodons, dodos), animals that are extinct but that people claim to have seen anyway (thylacines), and things that are included for no readily apparent reason (Disneyland travel posters, some antique Santa Claus figurines, a rather nice collection of tiki mugs). There’s even a display case of “cryptoscatology” with artificial (I hope) poop from different animals (and humans), plus a giant pile of Bigfoot poop for comparison.

There’s a small section on lake monsters, but the only Ogopogo items are a souvenir ashtray from Kelowna and a couple similar knick-knacks.

Sadly, they prohibit photos except of the items below. Copyright issues, according to the friendly but somewhat intense owner.

The sun came out in the afternoon and I did more wandering.

Most of downtown Portland is kind of grimy, but State Street, at the top of the hill, retains a lot of its 19th century grandeur.

The grandest mansion is the Victoria Mansion, built in the 1850s. That one has tours, but it was closed for the season.

So I went down to Wharf Street and had a Bissel Kickflip at Mash Tun.

Potsdamer Platz

After the Reichstag, I came back to the hotel and lounged around for a while. I didn’t really plan to go anywhere except KaDeWe in the late afternoon, but I got tired of lounging, so I went to Potsdamer Platz, which is on the way to KaDeWe.

Potsdamer Platz was right on the junction of the American, British, and Russian sectors, so the Wall ran right through it. There were some apartments and businesses overlooking the Wall (such as the studio where David Bowie and Iggy Pop recorded), but much of the area had been destroyed in the war and not rebuilt, or cleared away to form the no-man’s land between east and west. Most of what’s there now is less than 20 years old.

The location of the Wall is marked by a double row of bricks in the pavement.

The Wall: Much Shorter Now

I didn’t realize this until I got there, but down a side street is the last remaining BT 6 Watchtower of the DDR, just standing there on the sidewalk.

And this being December, it has a Santa hat.

Festive Tower of Death

The tower is a city monument, but it doesn’t receive any money. It’s run entirely by volunteers. Today it was staffed by a friendly woman named Susi who had worked in the Potsdamer Platz area in the mid-’80s and could see this tower from where she worked.

I climbed up in and looked around. Visibility is good, but there’s not a lot of space up there.

Window Office for Two

View Down the Base of the Tower

After the tower, I took the train to Wittenbergplatz and walked down Tauentzienstraße until I got too cold. By then it was time for an early dinner at the Wintergarten buffet on the top floor of KaDeWe. This is the most spectacular buffet I’ve ever seen. I recommend the Apfelstrudel.

Wintergarten

Now I need to pack. My train leaves Berlin tomorrow at 0630.

Stasi, KaDeWe, & Feuerzangenbowle

My foot and knee are still bothering me, and probably won’t recover until I stay off them for a while. So naturally today I walked almost eleven miles.

In the morning I went across the river to the East Side Gallery, which is a mile-long section of the Wall that was given over to artwork in 1990 and restored in 2009.

A lot of it is overtly political, not surprisingly, like this famous picture of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing, which until this trip I did not realize was based on a photo and the actual practice of communist heads of state.

Hard to imagine kissing Brezhnev. That’s the stuff of nightmares, that is. Not that Honecker would be a delight, but Brezhnev is somehow worse.

Tödliche Liebe

Some of the pieces are more fanciful.

Japanese Sector

There are signs threatening prosecution for defacing the murals, but a lot of them have graffiti anyway, like this Pink Floyd piece.

The Wall on the Wall

Of course the best is this one. Somewhere there’s a companion piece showing the other side, but I don’t know where it is. There are bits of the Wall all over the place.

Trabi

From there it was only a short hop on the U-Bahn to the Stasi museum, inside the old Stasi headquarters. There was a film crew there, so I wasn’t able to see Erich Mielke’s office, but I did snoop in some of the lesser offices when the film people weren’t paying attention.

Stasi HQ

At its peak, the Stasi complex covered 54 acres, with 50 office buildings.

Classic Communist Architecture

From there I took the train to the Checkpoint Charlie area. Of course it’s not the real Checkpoint Charlie, because that’s long gone, but everyone’s heard of Checkpoint Charlie and expects to see it, so they have a fake one. There’s also a Checkpoint Charlie museum and a film experience and a whole lot of souvenir shops all selling the same souvenirs. I bought a shirt.

Then I walked over to Unter den Linden and bought another shirt. Then I walked to the Brandenburg Gate, where someone was assembling a giant menorah.

Hitler would plotz.

Menorah at the Brandenburg Gate

Then I walked up Unter den Linden. Initially I was identifying things in the guidebook as I went, but it was getting colder and I started walking faster and I left my guidebook, and my hands, in my pockets most of the time, so I don’t know what everything was along the way.

Probably a Famous Building

In all of the tourist areas, there are guys selling genuine East German and Soviet hats and pins and flags. Absolutely for-sure real stuff.

Suspiciously New-Looking Relics

Some of the stores are even still selling pieces of the Wall. And in case you doubt them, they come with a certificate of authenticity. And certified authenticity is the most authentic authenticity.

After a brief stop at the hotel, I took the train to Kaufhaus des Westens, aka KaDeWe, the largest department store in continental Europe. All of it is impressive, but the food market is amazing. It’s an entire floor of cafes, delis, bakeries, candy stores, grocery stores, wine bars, and any other food-related thing you can think of. It is to an ordinary food court what West Berlin was to East Berlin. I think I spent close to an hour just wandering around on that floor.

KaDeWe

After I left KaDeWe, I got on the train going in the wrong direction. Could happen to anyone, really.

Eventually I made it back to Alexanderplatz and stopped in the Nikolaiviertel for a Feuerzangenbowle, as one does this time of year.

“Feuerzangenbowle,” it says here in Wikipedia, “is a traditional German alcoholic drink for which a rum-soaked sugarloaf is set on fire and drips into mulled wine. It is often part of a Christmas or New Year’s Eve tradition. The name translates literally to fire-tongs punch.” It’s a close relative to glühwein and thus to gløgg, but probably a bit stronger.

Feuerzangenbowle

The venue selling this concoction was right next to the Nikolaikirche, a (mostly reconstructed) 13th-century church that is now a museum. They seem to be connected to it in some way. They sell this drink and a few others and have the 1944 movie Die Feuerzangenbowle running on a continuous loop.

Feuerzangenbowlemarkt

The Nikolaiviertel itself is supposedly the historical center of Berlin. The church is legitimate, even if it’s mostly a restoration, and some of the other buildings are authentic, too. They’re just not necessarily authentic from that particular location. And a lot of the others are idealized recreations.

All of this was put together by the East German government for Berlin’s 750th anniversary in 1987. It’s sort of a Germanic Main Street USA.

Nikolaiviertel

Driving in Berlin

The Trabant was not bad. I rarely needed to go faster than about 40 kph, and the Trabi is highly maneuverable. Berlin traffic is another matter.

I paid extra to have the Trabi delivered to the hotel. The guy was a little late, and there was a very Cold War feel to waiting on the street in East Berlin to meet a man I didn’t know who was driving a Trabant. Although the Holiday Inn Express I’m staying in doesn’t quite fit the scenario.

When he arrived, he gave me a brief rundown on how to drive the car, and we went for a short drive. Then he took the U-Bahn to wherever he was going next, and I took off in the Trabi.

I found one of the two remaining portions of the Wall pretty easily — it was just across the river — but parking was impossible, so I kept going, heading toward Potsdamer Platz, with the vague goal of driving through the Tiergarten. I drove through the heart of West Berlin, past KaDeWe and other high-end stores while impatient people in high-end Mercedes sedans passed me.

After some trial and error, I made it into the Tiergarten and to the Victory Column at the center. Three euros to go to the top.

View from the Siegessäule

Then I used Google Maps to guide me to the Berlin Wall Memorial. It got me most of the way there, then inexplicably guided me in a loop through back streets several blocks away. I found the place easily once I turned off the mapping.

The memorial is a park with a section of the wall complex as it existed in 1989, including a guard tower and the death strip between the inner and outer walls. There’s a museum across the street.

Berlin Wall Memorial

Berlin Wall

Google Maps seems to drain the battery more quickly overseas than in the US. Three times this trip it’s died on me while I’m using it. The third time was shortly after I left the Wall. My only paper map was just a tourist map and not very detailed. Effectively, I had no map at all.

But I could see the Fernsehturm, even after dark, so I figured I could just guide myself by that. My plan was sheer elegance in its simplicity.

This was at about 4:30, and I headed straight into commute traffic. Also, roughly 90% of Berlin streets are under construction for one reason or another. Often, I could see where I wanted to go, but I couldn’t get there because I couldn’t change lanes, or because construction was in the way. I looped around Alexanderplatz three times, at one point crossing the river and getting stuck in traffic that was going to an opera. I escaped by backing down an alley.

I had to go back to the hotel, because that was the only place where I knew I could both park and charge my phone, which I needed to do so I could map where to return the car.

I made it back to the hotel at about 6:00. It had taken me 90 minutes. If I had taken a more normal route, it would have been a ten-minute trip of a little over two miles.

Berlin drivers are pretty aggressive, but mostly pretty good drivers. They remind me of Los Angeles drivers in that respect. Except for the taxi drivers. They drive like Italians.

Through all of this I was a minor celebrity. Everywhere I went, people smiled, waved, and took pictures. I should look into getting one of my own. It seems like it’s kind of a babe magnet.

Antifaschistischer Schutzwall