Rainy Days

The Fernsehturm as seen this morning on my walk to school, with part of its distinctive antenna hidden by clouds.

I keep a running list of my favourite German words--words that are just plain fun to say. One of these words is der Regenschirm, which means "umbrella." Well, let me tell you--I haven't gone out one day this past week without mein Regenschirm. The weather has been quite icky here. Like Vancouver-in-November weather. Gross, in other words. I guess I ought not to complain too much, since I was blessed with such wonderful weather last weekend in Prague, when it really mattered, but still. It seems to be human nature to be constantly hung up on the weather.

So what does one do in Berlin during a cold, rainy week? Well, here's what I did:

1. I ate pretty well.


My friend Amy (a vegan!) had read about this nearly-vegan "döner" place appropriately called "Vöner." (I say "nearly-vegan" because they do have cheese, but otherwise it's vegan.) We hit it up for lunch last one day last week after class. I don't know if you're aware of this, but döner is huge here in Berlin, thanks in large part to the city's large Turkish population. Most döner places have quite good falafels, which I'm usually very happy to have, but it's nice to be able to try a popular Berlin food that has been modified to be vegetarian-friendly. Vöner uses some kind of delicious fake meat that they even have set up on a spit to add an air of authenticity to the place. It's cheap, filling and delicious veggie food, and Amy and I vowed that we would return once a week until we try everything on their menu--they also serve vegan currywurst, veggie burgers and "chick'n" nuggets.



In fact, we went back today! I tried their seitan ("chick'n") nuggets and was a bit disappointed, so it looks like it's back to the vöner for me on next week's visit.

Vöner, located in young, vegan-friendly Friedrichshain.

My vöner. We also shared some deliciously seasoned fries.

Me enjoying my vöner.

The seitan nuggets I tried today. Tasted good, but they were tiny little things. I felt cheated.

Amy is like my veggie spirit guide in Berlin, I swear. A couple of weeks ago, she took me to this vegan grocery store called Veganz (I posted a photo of my haul). This past week I tried some of the veggie products I had bought, including some vegan bratwurst (disappointing--really just like any other tofu dog I've had) and battered "chick'n" fingers (quite yummy!). We also hit up Veganz after our lunch at Vöner, and I scooped up some more fake meat products to try my hand at. Also, I can't resist rhubarb, so I picked up a vegan rhubarb-streusel muffin from their bakery:

I ate half of it and then realised that I ought to take a picture of it...

The sun came out briefly yesterday afternoon, just in time for me to go on a walking tour of Jewish Berlin, set up by the Goethe Institut. While the other tours I've been on have been really good German practice for me, the guide for this one I just simply could not understand. It was okay, though, because from what I could understand, he wasn't saying anything I didn't already know. Certainly, we visited sites I had been to before. But what was great about the tour was that it ended close by to this little shop:

Yep, that says "Princess Cheesecake."

I couldn't resist, so I stopped in for a cup of tea (they had a pretty extensive tea menu, somewhat rare in Germany, including for some reason a tea called "Toronto splash" that, according to the menu, was a rooibos tea with basil (?) sweetened with maple syrup--I didn't try it because I don't like rooibos, and also it sounded a little gross, frankly) and a slice of cheesecake. Because really, how I could I not in a place called Princess Cheesecake? It's like whoever came up with the name for that place pulled it straight from my brain, or something.

My organic Earl Grey tea--steeping time adorably kept by an hourglass.

I had what was apparently a Russian-style cheesecake--plain cheesecake with a chocolate crust and chocolate streusel top.

The cheesecake, although good, did not come anywhere close to my mother's cheesecakes. I've been spoiled by her baking, and especially by her cheesecakes that she very lovingly makes for me every year for my birthday. That being said, having a slice of cheesecake--whoever made it--along with a good cup of tea can never be a bad way to end an afternoon.

But the rain returned today. In fact, we had a brief thunderstorm. Really, yesterday's sunshine was something of an anomaly, these days.

And what else is good rainy weather--or any weather--food? Pretzels, of course! I had three this past week!

BREZELN COUNT: 9


2. I hung out with friends.

Rainy days are also for movies. Last Wednesday, I hit up the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz (a modern square near the Brandenburg Gate--all the buildings are only about 20 years old because the area used to sit in the no-man's land between the Berlin Wall), where they show movies in English. While yes, it would have been good practice to watch a movie in German, movies are pretty darn expensive here so we wanted to ensure we got our full money's worth! We watched Star Trek in 3D (or, auf Deustch, drei-D). Highly entertaining. Also, they sell beer at movie theatres in Germany, of course. That might explain this picture somewhat:

Me with Evan and Andrew, after Star Trek.

Friday night we went to a bar in Friedrichshain that was bathed in red light that made Rorschach diagrams on the walls and had a DJ who played vaguely spaghetti-Western-themed music from the sixties that made me think of Bang! and miss my friends--you know who you are. Saturday we went to a Thai place in Kreuzberg that was super cute--no photos, alas--and then we set off in search of a bar to watch the championship finals, a soccer (sorry, "football") game that was big news in Germany because two German teams were facing off. We ended up watching it in the basement of an Indian restaurant, bizarrely, but it was fun (and also boring--soccer can be quite boring).


3. I went out anyway, damn it.

Every Monday morning at school, we're able to sign up for various excursions and activities the Institut has organised for the coming week. I had signed up for two Spaziergangen (walks) in different Berlin neighbourhoods, but I ended up not going to one due to the rain. I was signed up for another one this past Saturday and decided that I ought to just suck it up and go, so I did just that.

The tour was of the Kurfürstendamm, the main boulevard in West Berlin. I haven't really ventured to West Berlin in the four weeks I've been here so far, so that was part of the reason I decided to go on the walking tour. The street was the cultural centre of Berlin at the height of the Weimar days, but today it is home to some high-end shopping and shopping malls. It's certainly a ritzy part of town, and if it hadn't been raining it probably would have been more enjoyable to walk around there. As it was, it definitely not been a good idea to spend two hours outside walking in the cold and rain. My sneakers were soaked by the end of the walk, so I took refuge in KaDeWe (stands for Kaufhaus des Westens, or "Shopping Centre of the West"), the largest department store in continental Europe and a true Berlin institution. It's huge, certainly. Quite famously, its two top floors are for gourmet foods. They also have sections of food products from around the world. Canada's was, predictably, a maple syrup extravaganza.

Not pictured: Brie cheese (???), Pop Tarts, marshmallow Fluff and microwave popcorn--the last three things could also be found at the USA shelf and I think are examples of the Germans giving up trying to distinguish us from the States.

4. I visited a concentration camp.

Because, why not? You don't need nice weather to visit a concentration camp. In fact, bad weather only adds to the tragic feel of such a place.

The entrance to the camp, now a state memorial.

The gatehouse at the main entrance to the camp.

These damn, haunting words can also be found at the gates of Dachau, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

Sachsenhausen is located in Oranienburg, a small little town about an hour north of Berlin. It was one of the most important camps in the Nazi system, due in no small part to its proximity to the German capital. I mean, you had all these top Nazi officials just an hour away, thinking up evil things and needing a place to test them out. Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis in their gas chambers, was tested there, for instance. In general terms, Oranienburg was the administrative centre of the concentration camp system, and Sachsenhausen was a model camp. SS officers were often trained at the camp in methods of barbarity. Like many concentration camps in Germany, it started off in the mid-1930s as a camp for political prisoners--communist and socialist opponents to the Nazi regime--but also became a repository for homosexuals, Roma and Sinti and, after the war began, POWs. Jews were also imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, many at first only temporarily after the November 1938 pogrom (Kristallnacht)--the Nazis wanted to scare them into emigrating, and so released most of those rounded up during the pogrom after several months of hard labour. Many did emigrate, but not enough, I guess.

Most of the original barracks were razed, but a few remain and now house museum exhibits.

Part of the roll call ground.

Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp, not a death camp, but tens of thousands of people died in the camp from starvation, disease, torture and sheer murder. Hidden behind a wall at one end of the camp, but fooling no one, was a building infamously called "Station Z," to refer to the last station of life for the unfortunate prisoners who were led inside. Inside, there were execution halls (where SS soldiers could shoot Soviet POWs from the room next door, through a slit in the wall so they wouldn't have to see their victims--because apparently point-blank execution was sometimes a problem for Nazis), gas chambers and crematoria. Today the ruins of the crematoria remain, but everything else was destroyed by the Nazis as they fled the camp before the advancing liberating Red Army in the spring of 1945.

Remnants of the crematoria.

The memorial set up on the grounds of "Station Z."

Memorial stones left by visitors, in following with the Jewish tradition of leaving stones on graves.

On my last trip to Germany five years ago, I visited Dachau and Buchenwald, so this was not my first visit to a concentration camp. I think that made it easier for me, but visiting the camp still made for a pretty emotional day. It just doesn't really seem possible, that such evil existed, that such things occurred.

And, that the racism that served as the justification for such atrocity still exists.

Twenty years ago, the barrack that had been used to house Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen was nearly burnt down in an act of arson by right-wing extremists.

A few years ago, the Arbeit Macht Frei sign at Auschwitz was stolen by a group of twisted Nazi memorabilia collectors.

Just last month--a few days after Hitler's birthday--a swastika and other antisemitic slogans were spray painted on the wall of a concentration camp in Lithuania.

And it was just a few days ago, on Monday, the day after my visit to Sachsenhausen, that I went on that walking tour of Jewish Berlin and saw armed police guarding every Jewish institution we visited--synagogues, community centres, schools--a routine reality here in Germany.

So, you know. It's not like you can walk away from a visit to a place like Sachsenhausen and take heart in the fact that the world has changed. It has, sure. But not enough.

More Prague Photos

Here's a link (click on the photo--hopefully it'll work) to most of the photos I took in Prague last weekend, in case you're curious. I significantly weeded down my initial 850-odd photos, but there are still lots of similar photos here, FYI.

Prague, May 18-20

The Golden City

My train for Prague left early Saturday morning. Despite how large and spread out Berlin is, it didn't take very long for the train to leave the city behind and begin to breeze through the German countryside, which--at least in this part of the country--looks pretty much the same as southern Ontario countryside, except the houses are cute little European things with red-tiled roofs.

The train was ultimately destined for Vienna, but I was just on it for the first four hours until Prague. I was paranoid that there would be some problem with my ticket and they'd start yelling at me in German and kick me off the train in the middle of who knows where. Of course, in the end no one even checked my ticket at all. I thought it was because Europeans in general are really big on the honesty system when it comes to public transportation, but on the way back they did check--three times!--and of course all was fine.

The train was busy--possibly it always is, but it was a long weekend in Germany so I suspect it may have been more crowded than usual. I was glad I reserved my seat for the extra four Euros, as people were wandering around looking for free seats. One woman even sat down on the floor, which doesn't seem like a fun way to spend four hours. 

Lunch on the train, from my favourite German pretzel chain, Ditsch!

BREZELN COUNT: 6

The landscape changed outside of Dresden. It became all these great big hills and cliffs and picturesque rivers. Too bad it was all grey and rainy. The train emptied out quite a bit at Dresden and  not as many new people boarded. Although, there was a cute German family sitting in front of me, with their three cute little blond German children. They drank from juice boxes and played  I-Spy, like children everywhere do on trips, I suppose.

Shortly thereafter, I suddenly realised that all the signs in the towns we were passing were in Czech.  We had passed over from Germany into the Czech Republic and I had had no idea...well, possibly there was an announcement abut it, but it would have been in German and/or Czech and I clearly missed it. No one ever asked for my passport. It must be what travelling through the EU is like, but it's pretty weird.

Famed German punctuality ensured that we arrived at the main train station in Prague right on the money. I found a bank machine and took out some Czech Korunas (incidentally, one Czech Koruna equals about 0.05 Euros, so the bank machine gave me a two-thousand Koruna bill, which I wasn't quite sure what to do with...). I had no time initially to admire Prague's insane beauty, as I had speed through the Old Town to meet my contact for the apartment I had rented through airbnb.com (the same website I used to find my Berlin apartment--I'd highly recommend using it!). Here's an exterior shot of the building.

Karlova 24

Shockingly, I forgot to take photos of the interior of the apartment, which is not like me at all. Probably I was too anxious to get outside and take photos of the city itself. I ended up taking about 850 photographs, and easily could have taken more but was worried for my camera's battery life. Even as it was, on Sunday I had to take an hour's detour to my apartment to recharge my battery just enough to get me through the rest of  day. 

Prague is a magical city. Its beauty is kind of surreal, in fact. Everyone I know who has been had told me so, but it's hard to imagine. It's all red-roofed Gothic, renaissance, and baroque buildings, and tiny winding cobblestone streets and about a gazillion churches and towers. Admittedly, I stuck very close to the Old Town square and never really left the throng of tourists, but the Prague that I saw was certainly wonderful.

After dropping off my bags at my rented digs, I set out to explore the city for what was left of the afternoon and evening on Saturday. I started off by grabbing a cup of tea and a slice of carrot cake in a cafe near my apartment, and then I set out for Petrin Hill, a hill right in the middle of Prague that offers wonderful views of the city. I opted to take the funicular car up the hill to save time and energy, which was a good decision as it was quite a long way up. Also, at the top there's this tower you can climb up to get a bird's eye view of the city. It was 300 steps up, but was well worth it.

It's a mini Eiffel Tower! Interestingly, it is supposed to be at the same height as the real Eiffel Tower, if you count the hill it stands upon.

Prague, with the famous Charles Bridge.

Prague Castle, with St. Vitus' Cathedral in the middle of it.

Petrin Hill is on the other side of the Vltava River from the Old Town, so after walking back down the hill, I began to make my way back across the river towards Wenceslas Square. Really, it was more of a wide boulevard, lined with restaurants and shops. And tourists, everywhere of course. Wenceslas Square is not quite as charming as the Old Town Square, with its towers and churches and picturesque buildings. 

Crossing back over the river from Petrin Hill. The funky building on the right is known as the Dancing Building and is a Frank Gehry design.

Lovely Prague.

Lovely Prague II.

I loved the colour of this building.

Looking down Wenceslas Square.

The National Museum, presiding majestically over Wenceslas Square. (I did not go, because it felt criminal to be indoors on such a glorious day in such a glorious city.)

The Old Town Square.

I grabbed dinner at a pan-Asian noodle bar after dismissing about ten other restaurants for their (expected) lack of vegetarian options. It was actually quite good, and I chased it down with some coconut gelato, as everyone in Europe seems to love ice cream an inordinate amount (or is there no such a thing as loving ice cream inordinately?). Turns out, the Old Town at night is just as lovely as it is during the day, with the exception of there being more loud, drunken teenagers milling about. 

The Old Town Square, just after sunset.

Ditto.

And again.

The next morning I was up early to walk across Charles Bridge before the throng of tourists. It was worth the early wake-up. (Also included: some photos from the bridge I took the night before.)

The tower on the Old Town's side of Charles Bridge.

Lovely Prague III...

...and in daylight!

The other end of Charles Bridge, leading to the Lesser Town.

Looking back over Charles Bridge towards the Old Town.

Lovely Prague IV.

With views like that, it's easy to see why walking across Charles Bridge is the thing to do as a tourist in Prague.

After crossing the bridge in the early morning air, I needed to find a place for breakfast. I felt like a silly (North) American doing it, but the only place open at eight in the morning was Starbucks. However, Czech Starbucks have these delicious chocolate-cherry muffins with real pieces of cherry in them, and this super creamy yogurt with honey and nuts and raisins. It was actually the best breakfast I've had on this trip so far...!

Otherwise, you know, Starbucks are the same everywhere.

Well fuelled up, I left Starbucks and began the climb up some steep medieval streets to Prague Castle, with its gorgeous views and impressive palaces and cathedral. The castle is apparently one of the largest such complexes in Europe, and certainly it's one of the oldest medieval castles, dating back to 900 AD. I paid admission and was able to go into several of the buildings, which were beautiful, although the exhibits were not as informative as I would have liked. In fact, I returned to the Castle grounds later that day while on a free walking tour of the city and learned more about the place, including the fact that it was once briefly conquered by the Swedes (in the 1600s) and that the imposing cathedral, St. Vitus', took 1000 years from beginning to completion--apparently, that's why parts of the building are darker than others, since the sandstone it's made out of darkens with age. 

On my way up to Prague Castle.

On the way to the Castle.

Lovely Prague V.

Closer!

Prague Castle.

Its view.

The view from one of the palace rooms.

Prague Castle, again.

St. Vitus' Cathedral.

The doors of the cathedral.

The cathedral again.

A glimpse of St. Vitus'.

I just loved this door. It was in a passageway between two parts of the castle grounds and probably led into a closet, but really--it was lovely.

On my way back down from the Castle, I stopped for some gingerbread and a Trdelnik, a traditional Czech snack that's basically warm, sweet bread covered in cinnamon sugar. (It was so good I had another one on my way to the train station the next day!) 

Gingerbread from the "Gingerbread Museum" (not really a museum!).

The Trdelnik place

Mmm.

I stopped in at the Wallenstein Palace Gardens on my way back to the Old Town, and was very glad I had, because it was breathtakingly pretty, compete with peacocks and all! This was the point when my camera died, but not before I was able to snap some photos:

The Wallenstein Palace Gardens.

Again.

Enjoy the gardens, but please keep of the grass and leave your guns at home.

After a brief pause at my apartment to recharge my overworked camera, I headed to the Old Town Square, literally just five minutes from my apartment, and joined the free walking tour. 

Some photos from the tour:

The Astronomical Clock. It's super duper old and has been keeping perfect time, still with the original clock mechanisms inside.

Buildings in the Old Town.

Inside St. Peter's.

It looks like someone peeled off a layer of this building's skin or something, and then got really lazy and decided not to finish the job. Very weird.

Franz Kafka memorial in the Old Jewish Quarter.

Little Venice.

Our guide was great--quite funny and knowledgeable--and I made some friends with two people on the tour who were visiting from Vienna. They saw I was travelling alone and kindly offered to meet up later for a drink after the tour, which was pretty cool, as one was a Spanish-Colombian working in Vienna and the other was a Bulgarian working as an au pair in Vienna. They had already been learning German in Vienna for a year, and so they knew much more than I did, but it was pretty cool to have a half-English and half-German conversation at a bar in Prague!

The weather was amazing all weekend--gloriously sunny and warm but not hot. It rained only Sunday evening, so really I can't complain. I was quite lucky, in fact. And, two years of living in Vancouver has taught my to always pack an umbrella, so I was prepared even for the brief rain we did have.

Oh, and on Sunday night I also went to this great vegetarian restaurant that I had looked up, and I was able to order veggie versions of some traditional Czech dishes, each made with soy-based fake meats. It doesn't look that appetizing,but actually it was quite good!

Vegetarian svickova: soy "meat" with a vegetable-cream sauce, dumplings, cream, cranberries and lime.

Monday morning I had a slower start to day. I returned the keys to be apartment and then went to Bohemia Bagel, a well-known chain of bagel places in Prague stated by some American ex-pats. It was underwhelming. I didn't linger very long over my breakfast before making my way to the famous old Jewish quarter. Prague's Jewish community is one of the oldest in Europe, and the Jewish Museum offers an audio-guided tour of six important Jewish sites, including several synagogues and a medieval cemetery. I seem to have a thing for old Jewish cemeteries, because the cemetery was certainly the highlight of the tour for me. My beloved Weißensee Cemetery in Berlin is much larger and more beautiful, but Prague's cemetery speaks to an older history, with graves dating back to the 1400s. Confined as they were in a ghetto for so many centuries, Prague's Jews had no choice but to keep piling dirt on top of the existing graves and bury their dead several layers deep. An estimated 12,000 graves are in the cemetery, which is not even a full city block in area. The result is a haunting sight of undulating hills, and layers upon layers of gravestones competing for footing.

The Old Jewish Cemetery.

Again.

The old Jewish Burial Society building, next to the cemetery.

The majority of Prague's Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust--today, most of the synagogues in the Old Jewish Quarter are museums. One, the Pinkas Synagogue, is a Holocaust memorial. Being the somewhat jaded, erstwhile Holocaust scholar that I am, I was not expecting to be as moved as I was by the memorial. Possibly it's because I was not expecting to walk into a memorial but rather an old, empty synagogue, which, indeed it was, only in addition to the ark and bimah, which had been preserved, the walls were covered in names. Tens of thousands of names, one for each of Prague's (known) Jewish victims of the Holocaust. To stand in an empty synagogue, surrounded by those thousands of names...it hit me rather forcefully. It was one of the most straightforward and most effective Holocaust memorials I've seen...and I've seen many, so that's saying something.

The exterior of the Pinkas Synagogue. Photos were not permitted inside.

The exterior of the beautiful Spanish Synagogue. It was the most beautiful synagogue I had ever been in. (And again, unfortunately, photos were not permitted. But Google-image it for an idea.)

Beyond the synagogues and cemetery there isn't really anything else in the neighbourhood that speaks to the Jewish life that was once so predominant in those streets. After the Czech king emancipated Prague's Jews in the late-1800s, the ghetto was dismantled and Jews moved to other neighbourhoods. Eventually the area became quite built up and ritzy--today it's home to high-end designer shops (in fact, one of the main streets is called Paris Street) and beautiful buildings. I was a bit disappointed that this is all the Old Jewish Quarter is today--given how old the Jewish community is in Prague, I suppose I was expecting something more like a shtetl in the middle of the city. A bit naive of me to think so, perhaps, but still. The name "Old Jewish Quarter" is a bit misleading, that's all.

I shouldn't be disappointed, of course. In fact, I ought to be grateful for the remnants there are, given how much of Jewish life was wiped out by the Nazis during the war. It is somewhat perverse, but the synagogues and Old Jewish Cemetery that I visited in Prague would not be standing today if it had not been for Hitler. That's sounds wrong, but for some reason Hitler permitted the physical landmarks of the community to be spared, if not the members themselves. It's not entirely clear why, but the prevailing opinion is that Hitler wanted to preserve Prague's Old Jewish Quarter as a kind of museum of curiosities, chronicling what he had intended to be an extinct population of a subhuman people.

After being sufficiently saddened by all that, I left the Jewish quarter and grabbed some tea and a macaron for a pick-me-up (not very Czech, but you know, delicious) at Wenceslas Square before heading back to the train station to catch my train back to Berlin.

The train ride back was good. The weather was much nicer than it had been on my way in a few days earlier, so I was able to enjoy more of the scenery, which was beautiful. Lots of little towns with church spires, perched along the river, nestled among these lovely green mountains. Beautiful, yes, but I found myself thinking it was nothing different from the kinds of scenery I'd seen at home--of course, right as I was thinking that, I noticed that perched high upon one of these small mountains was the ruins of an old fortified castle. So, you know, a bit different from Canada, after all. 

Next trip planned: la Paris in three weeks' time! Let's see if the City of Lights can surpass the Golden City in my books. It'll be quite the challenge, although I suspect it's one that Paris is up to.