I’m back from Berlin.
‘les and I spent almost a week there, hanging out and doing some touristing. It’s always amusing to me to see how different people approach traveling. With The Hate Monger, we’re always Go!Go!Go! from one thing to the next. We’ll hit a million things in a day, from museums to churches to castles. If the town we’re in is small, we’ll see all three of those in a day. By myself, I tend to be really Go!Go!Go! as well, although I think that I sleep in a bit later.
With ‘les or AE, it’s more about being on holiday so we eat a lot, go to a few bars, and maybe see a site or two. I think this is owning to the fact that they’ve both already did the Grand Tour of Europe thing before so traveling now is a little less about trying to hit all the major tourist spots and more about soaking up the city. It’s fun. We’ll go to an area that sounds interesting or has something we should really go see and then just walk around, peeking into shops and stopping to have coffee somewhere.
So that’s what ‘les and I did last week. ‘les had been to Berlin before so she had a good idea of how to navigate the city and I just followed her wherever we were going. Last time she visited, she tried walking everywhere, which you can normally do if you’re just trying to hit all the tourist sites. But Berlin is sprawly and having that big wall in the middle of it with competing governments trying to show off how important their side of the city is makes for long walks between stuff to see. So we took the metro everywhere instead.
It was a good plan, I have to say. The Berlin transit system is really nice and includes above and below ground trains *and* trams. I do enjoy riding non-bus-based mass transit. I love trams and subways for some reason. They’re so pleasant. Berlin’s system reminded me of riding the subway in New York for some reason. They’re system is pretty much the same as the ones in Munich and Cologne so it really makes no sense that it would remind me of New York – I think it’s all the graffiti.
Berlin’s full of graffiti. More so than many of the other European cities I’ve been to. Paris has very little except for on a few buildings like Les Frigos or the Palais de Tokyo – which are covered in constantly changing spray paint. I hardly remember any in Italy or Spain, except for the random political scrawling and stencils here and there. Maybe I’ve just always been in the graffiti-free tourist areas elsewhere? I dunno.
Speaking of graffiti, we went to the East Side gallery the first day we were in Berlin – it’s a section of the wall that a bunch of different artists were invited to paint. The wall has started crumpling and there’s been a lot of wear on the paint – pieces of both were chipping off here and there. But much more damaging to the pieces were all the tourist “signatures” all over everything. People carve, spray paint, and pencil in little notes on top of the art. I guess they want to feel like their part of the thing? I dunno. Graffiti on top of drab bridges and buildings doesn’t bother me, but defacing existing art always bugs me. People do this sort of thing everywhere. When I climbed to the top of the Vatican in Rome, there were all these names and dates carved into the wall up top. There were names from the 18th or 19th century carved into the walls of the cloisters behind the Cathedral in Tours. But in this case, there are little plaques all over asking people not to tamper with the wall. I wish people would just go round to the other side of the thing and write their names on the totally blank space round back instead.
Ok. More later. I have to tell you about green beer…
