On the internet, nobody knows you're closed.

I found a cool website the other day, covering "Hidden Berlin". Great write-ups, good details, and nice pics. So I chose a few locations and headed out to Berlin's eastern reaches.

First on the list was a restaurant cited as the "most beautiful in Berlin," on the shores of the Grosser Mueggelsee, the largest of Berlin's lakes. The restaurant, unfortunately, was closed -- as in, not in existence. However, the lake is quite nice, and I found a great biergarten as a more than acceptable fallback.

I then walked *under* the Spree, and along a beautiful, well-tended path through the forest, several neighborhoods, and a huge cemetery to the next spot on the list, the Treptow Crematorium. Morbid, yes, but as good as the write-up claimed: a perfectly disciplined, inspiring, and intelligent piece of modern architecture. Unfortunately, also closed, but I was able to get an ok pic through the full-length windows.


By now, it had occured to me that the printouts from site I was relying on so heavily gave no indication of when they were written or updated. Later, I checked and saw that the last copyright was 2001. It's likely the abandoned project of someone whose enthusiasms led them to new activities, leaving an orphaned website to live in perpetuity like a once carefully tended garden that slowly succumbs to weeds without completely losing its original form.


Which perhaps makes it appropriate that the last spot on the itinerary was a garden. A stunning garden, in fact, and a true hidden gem, tucked away deep in Neuekolln, a neighborhood (charitably) described on Wikipedia as "having no must-see sights."

Designed by Franz Koerner and built from 1912-1916, the garden is a rectangle sunk below street level, with a formal flower garden, grand fountain (no longer running, sadly) and an ivy-covered orangery which today houses a modern art gallery and cafe.


All in all, a rewarding (and tiring) day, despite a few glitches. My thanks to the creator of http://www.berlin-hidden-places.de/yuba_web3/index.htm

Berlin: the city that keeps on giving.

What's in a name?

Despite lukewarm success with their first company, "Hindenburg Airways", the Schmidt's expand into the travel agency business...

Sequential Planning

(Note: mobile phone pic.)

I've now moved more into critical path planning. Scandinavia (July): check. Eastern Europe (August): not check, but not critical path.

France (September-November): double check. I enrolled in my language classes, and locked down a place to live for September. Unfortunately, the latter is a residence hotel, not a private apartment. But, Montpellier, along with many other French cities, hosts the Rugby World Cup every weekend in September, and the pickins were slim. So, I chose to confirm someplace, to create a little breathing room in which to find something with a bit more character for October and November.

The school, Accent Francais, continues to be very responsive, which I find encouraging. My second biggest fear is that the school will turn out to be a joke. My biggest fear is that I won't like Montpellier, or that it won't like me (I can always make a fuss and change schools, but a new city would require a few days planning).

I relish the feelings of heading to a new place, sight unseen. Although it can be nerve-wracking, I find the psychological journey from concept, to pre-conception, to first impression, to familiarity and finally to recollection to be fascinating.

I remember it best with Florence, although I can follow the spectrum of impressions with every new change I've made. The sight of the Duomo's multicolored marble rising up next to our bus as we stepped off is etched in my brain. Then the slow, exciting process of discovering more and more of the city, street by street.

New finds become familiar friends, and the process continues, until one day you realize that the first impression, and even more so, the pre-conception, have faded, replaced by an ever-increasingly coherent and realistic (and sometimes, ultimately boring) view of where you really are. (There are a lot of parallels here with aging in general, but I'm focusing specifically on geographic impressions right now.)

Riding and walking around Berlin these last few weeks, I've been toying with the idea of a neighborhood's "center of gravity" and how it can shift as your understanding of the local [insert geo/topo/demo/etc.]-graphy expands.

For example, there's little question that the center of gravity for Friedrichshain is Simon-Dach-Strasse, when it comes to nightlife. That puts me on the west edge. But, as I rode around to the north of Karl-Marx-Allee the other day, I found a couple of seriously-bustling "brunch corners", three large parks I never knew about, and a whole shopping complex. Which warped the boundaries I had previously assumed, and tilted things a bit.

After that tour, I would have said I live on the southwest edge, instead. But then, the next day, I discovered a canal that runs southwest of here with a lot of nice apartments and restaurants...so maybe I'm more in the center.

Then again, on a broader scale, Mitte is now the center, with Charlottenburg still carrying some weight to tip it to the west. Which puts me pretty far east, in the bigger picture.

(By the way, it's not that I haven't been paying attention for the last two years. Berlin is seriously, monumentally, abnormally BIG for a European city. Nine times the area of Paris, for example. There are a lot of nooks and even more crannies.)

That's my point, I guess. The process of orienting yourself...understanding where you really are, in relation to everything else, can be infinitely rewarding, surprising and sometimes unsettling.

Before you accuse me of only liking the anticipation of where I'm going -- rather than the reality of where I am -- please note my diligence in exploring Berlin. I have "done" every street in a 20 block radius (I checked) and most of the tourist areas in greater Berlin. That familiarity is part of the "leveling out" process too. Three months may not be enough to do Montpellier justice. Two years certainly hasn't been enough for Berlin. To anyone reading this, come. You will like it.

It's now in my top three: New York, London, Berlin. (Sorry, Firenze. But you'll always be a "special friend".) I saw a note on a blog recently that said Germans don't really think about Berlin, except to feel a bit sorry for those that live here. My first thought was: "When was the last time you saw a t-shirt that said 'Paris, London, New York, FRANKFURT'???" Amsterdam, Rome, Florence and Tokyo can replace one of the above, but unless you're part of a school trip, the German city is going to be Berlin.

Berlin has something special...not "bling", not beauty, definitely not bustle. Just a feeling of being comfortable with what it is. A big, pretty hip, pretty cosmopolitan joint stuck way too far up and to the right to play in the sandbox in the middle of the playground, but confident enough about itself to wait for the cooler kids to find their way over to the edge.

Which leads me back to Montpellier. On a macro level, I already have my pre-conceptions...I've seen pictures, and know that the Place de la Comedie is the epicenter. Or so I think. :)

On a micro level, within the city bounds, I know my hotel will be in the modern district, tangent to the old town. I know the school is close to the Place de la Comedie. I don't know how I will get from one to the other, what will be near me (internet says stores and markets, which is handy). The beach should be 15-20 minutes, but what kind of beach, how to get there, etc.

And then, what about Toulouse, Barcelona, the rest of the coast?

I guess the good news is: three months in Montpellier is a timeframe set only by myself.

So, satellite view for those playing along at home:



The green dot is my hotel.

Old dog + new tricks = few pics

My short-term objectives include a lot of slimming down.

I mean that in two ways.

First, the obvious. If I am going to stride confidently up to a jeune femme in a cafe and suavely ask what she's reading, it would be nice not to have my beer belly telegraphing my arrival.

To that end, I've been trying to make good use of the suddenly vast amount of free time I engineered for myself.

In my roughly-sketched plan, the summer is dedicated to Berlin (with wiggle room for Northern and Eastern European ventures), so my days have mostly involved biking or walking through areas of the city I'm less familiar with. Major expeditions to date include:

- Treptower Park: During the summer, at least, this is really more like two parks, separated by the 4-lane Puschkinallee (boulevard) that was part of my commute home from work. The strip running along the Spree river is what I imagine Coney Island or Boston's Revere Beach used to be like: hot dog (ok, bratwurst) and ice cream stands, carnival games and rides (some with a decidely more adult flare than would be accepted by the 4-H carnival!) , counterfeit sunglass vendors, kids splashing in fountains, and a couple of semi-permanent biergartens. All swarming with true locals. (Trust me, this one ain't even in Rough Guide, let alone Frommer's.) The energizing -- if eventually maddening -- sound of synthesized, and overlapping, one-man oompa bands keeps it all moving.

On the other side of the road, away from the Spree, it's a much more placid scene. Like the Tiergarten, the theme is forest, grass and shrubs, and ponds, broken up by the occasional perfectly tended flower garden. Unlike the Tiergarten, though (which is a sublimely subtle and serene urban space), Treptower got stepped on by one MOTHER of a monument to the Soviet soldiers killed during the Battle of Berlin. There are a few areas where the USSR indisputably claimed victory: vodka, military uniforms, caviar, surveillance, and monuments that -- rather than inspire -- make you feel about as big as a pea.

At the west end of Treptower Park, Schillingbrucke bridge crosses the Spree, providing a vantage point for admiring the stunning sculpture "Molecule Man" by the American Jonathan Borofsky.

- Prenzlauer Burg. I'd live here in a second if it weren't just as far from the rest of the city as Freidrichshain (and up a hill, which is rare in Berlin). It may win "most-gentrified but still cool" award. If I had two young kids, I suspect the government would actually require that I submit written justification for living in Friedrichshain instead of Prenzlauer Burg. Friedrichshain may have a similar, but inverted, requirement for young parents with multiple tattoos.

- Tiergarten. Simply the best urban park I have ever had the pleasure of exploring. My scope is limited, but I don't think Central Park can hold a candle to it. Flowers, ponds, fountains, statues, hidden nooks, broad open fields. And not a drug needle in sight. Just ignore the naked people.

The other slim down regimen involves purging. Papers from 2003, electrical adaptors for gadgets I don't even remember buying, clothes I've never worn, and, in particular, large, heavy items. What I keep has to fit into a Mini, remember? Can anyone tell me why it's called a "Mini"? Anyone? Bueller?

The first casualty was my Dell XPS. While lightening fast, it was heavier than an anvil. It was also starting to show some pretty severe signs of age, so I replaced it with a sleek, sexy, silent MacBook Pro.

The transition has been harder than I expected. My biggest struggle has been with pictures. I think I copied all of them over successfully, but I can't be certain, since they were immediately and voraciously sucked into some huge iPhoto library vortex. I am currently trying to do a nose count and to get several thousand pics back into some semblance of order.

All of which is to say: I do have some new pics to show off, but you're going to have to wait a bit. And since this meant to be a photo-centric blog, I've been holding off on posting at all.

I did spend a few hours wrestling these out of the iPhoto Library (aka hidden vault of never ending doom).

They're from my Leipzig trip, which (unintentionally, I swear) coincided with the annual Gothic Wave Fest...an event drawing Goths young and old to the city from around the world.

After checking in to my hotel, I headed across the street to the old town and started wandering. At first, I thought I must have stumbled onto something so weird, so "authentic" and so bizarre -- an entire city populated by Goths -- that Rick and Lonely Planet were just too politically correct to comment on it.

But, after the fifth woman (and second man) in a corset tighter than my apartment building parking space walked by, I clocked that it wasn't like this every day in Leipzig. The tolerant but bemused looks of the few identifiable locals I spotted confirmed it. As did the camera crews. At which point I began to notice the thousands of flourescent posters wrapped around anything tall, stationary and round. So much for my career as the next Sherlock.

Because Gothic Wave is a multi-day event, many of the black-clad, white-faced subterranean dwellers were forced to expose themselves in the midday sun, if only to obtain sustenance.

While this was amusing in and of itself, other secrets revealed themselves under the harsh glare of daylight.

Some Goths drive BMWs (black, natch) and stay at five-star hotels. Some sport DK guides to Germany. Others like to splash in fountains on hot days. And, many, many like ice cream. I can only hope the irony of ordering vanilla wasn't lost on them.

Truth be told, they added some appropriate character to the cobblestoned old town. As you can see from the older gent's expression, there's a lot to be said for dressing up and having fun.

I definitely recommend Leipzig as an overnight or daytrip from Dresden or Berlin. The old town is compact, almost completely car-free, and contains several architecturally noteworthy churches and government buildings, including the church where Bach was choirmaster and is entombed. Leipzig also sports a 3-star zoo, with 5-star plans. Lutherstadt Wittenberg, where Martin Luther held sway, is a quick and pleasant drive north. If you head that way, be SURE to check out the school designed by Hundertwasser. Try to visit the school on a weekend so you can roam. If only all kids had this to look forward to in the morning.