Something you should know about Berlin: It's not Paris. I know, this seems incredibly obvious and certainly appears to be something that one could learn by spending eight seconds looking at a map, rather than dropping $1100 on a plane ticket. But there's a difference between knowing the difference and seeing it for yourself, between understanding that two different places have two different names and actually feeling the cataclysmic historical divide that must separate the two cities. I've been to a few European capitals: London, Paris, Moscow and Rome, and while each one feels very different they all share some common atmosphere. Each one feels like a capital; everywhere you go you're assaulted by monuments and history and art and culture, delicious food at extreme prices, tall, thin and well dressed people and the like. Even Yerevan, a much, much poorer capital than any of the European giants already mentioned, had that same kind of capital-smell about it. But Berlin is different, somehow.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on Karl-Marx-Allee, the long street through Friedrichshain and Mitte built during the era of the East-West divide. An interesting bike ride starts back near the Tiergarten at the height of Berlin Touristisch and heads east all the way to Franzosiche Tor at the end of Karl-Marx-Allee. You will be amazed how aggressively the architectural style as ornate, Deutsch estate homes give way to the towering, Sovient-era human warehouses that line the Allee. It's exactly this kind of thing--the visible historical struggle behind the cultural mask--that I think makes Berlin so different from other European capitals. To me this actually seems like a very American city, like a city defined by where it's going rather than where it came from. Although don't take that the wrong way, Berlin, you're still very impressive and not at all like Poughkeepsie, I promise.
I go to get lunch Nils, my new Couchsurfing host. Over a plate of not-at-all-vegetarian kebab he tells me that he can just remember living in Berlin before reunification. Apparently his older brother used to ride the S-Bahn to school, back when some stops were East flavored and some West, and if you got on at one there were nice men with guns waiting at the other to make sure you didn't get off by accident. Unbelievable, I think between bites of surprisingly tasty chicken cut from a giant cone, the immediacy of what feels to me like very distant history--of course the Berlin wall coming down is part of my history too but not my personal history. It's a date and a talking point, not a guy with an assault rifle waving me through a checkpoint. Nils tells me that he can actually still tell which of his friends grew up in the East and which grew up in the West. Their personalities are still that different.
Ayran is a pretty tasty drink make from yogurt and milk. Someone unfairly jokes that it tastes like semen, and this makes me upset.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on Karl-Marx-Allee, the long street through Friedrichshain and Mitte built during the era of the East-West divide. An interesting bike ride starts back near the Tiergarten at the height of Berlin Touristisch and heads east all the way to Franzosiche Tor at the end of Karl-Marx-Allee. You will be amazed how aggressively the architectural style as ornate, Deutsch estate homes give way to the towering, Sovient-era human warehouses that line the Allee. It's exactly this kind of thing--the visible historical struggle behind the cultural mask--that I think makes Berlin so different from other European capitals. To me this actually seems like a very American city, like a city defined by where it's going rather than where it came from. Although don't take that the wrong way, Berlin, you're still very impressive and not at all like Poughkeepsie, I promise.
I go to get lunch Nils, my new Couchsurfing host. Over a plate of not-at-all-vegetarian kebab he tells me that he can just remember living in Berlin before reunification. Apparently his older brother used to ride the S-Bahn to school, back when some stops were East flavored and some West, and if you got on at one there were nice men with guns waiting at the other to make sure you didn't get off by accident. Unbelievable, I think between bites of surprisingly tasty chicken cut from a giant cone, the immediacy of what feels to me like very distant history--of course the Berlin wall coming down is part of my history too but not my personal history. It's a date and a talking point, not a guy with an assault rifle waving me through a checkpoint. Nils tells me that he can actually still tell which of his friends grew up in the East and which grew up in the West. Their personalities are still that different.
Ayran is a pretty tasty drink make from yogurt and milk. Someone unfairly jokes that it tastes like semen, and this makes me upset.
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