Berlin begins to make sense

Alla and I gave ourselves a fairly thorough introductory tour of Berlin yesterday. We started the process on foot, walking from the main train station to a bunch of the places our books recommended. We couldn’t get inside of the Reichstag or the old Soviet television tower without reservations or an inordinate wait, so we kept moving until we could sit down on a boat and get another look at the city from the Spree River. We haven’t absorbed as much as we’ve seen, but we’ve gained a sense of context.

Having checked off so many must-do items in one day, we took today at a much easier pace. After church we gathered a picnic lunch and took it to the grounds behind the Charlottenburg Palace. I’m sure we’d love to see the inside of the palace too, but we found the grounds quite satisfactory and didn’t manage to get inside. The only building we entered was a little out-building now serving as a quite interesting (and manageably small) museum of porcelain.

As we approached the palace, I withered in the sun and cursed my decision not to bring shorts. Fortunately, we found a shady bench on the quite-cool bank of the river behind the palace and we settled there for our picnic. After lunch Alla let me read a Pushkin story, “The Blizzard,” aloud to her in Russian. I really like this story, which I read for the first time on the train coming to Berlin. Pushkin wrote well enough that Alla even enjoyed the story as it unfolded at my slower-than-ideal reading pace.

By the time I finished reading, the air had cooled off so we enjoyed a very pleasant walk through the formal areas of the palace garden, emerging at the far end of the property. We were glad to discover a Metro station nearby, and we managed to get to the big Berlin Dom cathedral in time for the evening service. The beautiful cathedral includes an excellent organ. Since we couldn’t understand the service in German, we particularly focused on the music and the architecture.

When we left the church we discovered with pleasure that we finally recognized a few areas on the map as we planned our trip to dinner. Unfortunately, a budding sense of context does not make the public transportation system easy to use. We still find the S-Bahn, U-Bahn, Deutsche Bahn system problematic all by itself, let alone the fact that we are nearly hopeless at finding any given station on a surface map of the city. While we can navigate between any two stations once we find them on the map, we can still find only a small fraction of the stations without wanting to refer to Google Maps. But at least the city feels a bit familiar now, and we’re excited about seeing some other sites with the level of detail we enjoyed at the palace garden today.