Berlin

Our son, Mike, lives in Berlin and works for Transparency International, an NGO that focuses on corruption. We visited him in late September. He lives in what used to be West Berlin, about a block from a section of the wall that has been kept as a memorial. His apartment is on the top floor, to the right of the central stairwell. No elevator, and that building has really high ceilings, so each flight of stairs is really, really long.

Several of the buildings around Mike's building aren't as tall as his, so he has a nice sense of space as you look out of his windows. The reward of climbing all those stairs.

In that last photo, you can see a church spire behind the tree. There were lovely bells ringing often from that spire. At least they were lovely at first, but when a set of bells rang at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, I wondered how the neighbors felt. And indeed, without my asking Mike, he gave a pretty passionate speech about how invasive he found those bells, particularly the early morning bells on Sunday morning. It made me think about the way the church appears to outsiders in so many ways.

Dave and Mike climbed up a tower near the Tiergarten, the central park in Berlin, and got a good overview of the city.

Berlin is a mix of old and new, as you can see from the photo below. The juxtaposition of old and new is visible in many parts of the city, really in almost every block.

The Brandenburg Gate, photo above, is the iconic place in Berlin. Graphics of the gate appear everywhere as a logo for the city. I wish I'd taken a photo of those graphics because I liked them. One of the most moving things we saw were little metal tiles on the ground in front of apartment buildings to remember Jews who used to live there. The little squares are maybe 5 inches across. The first one below, for example, says "Here lived Erich Marcuse, born 1905, deported 1943 to Auchschwitz, died 21 February 1945 at Dachau." The three below (perhaps a family) were next to each other, but they weren't the only ones we saw. History is so immediate in Berlin, particularly WWII and the division of the city into East and West, which ended in 1989.

To end on a lighter note, Dave loved the poster below and wants it to be a picture of him in years to come.