Ich habe einen Koffer in Berlin geschleppt

There's a reason I haven't posted about Berlin for a while. It's because the city is so complex that's it's hard to know what to make of it.* My photos are a bizarre jumble of strange places, always with an atmosphere of the surreal. And speaking of what's real and what's not, I realized something new about Berlin this trip that I didn't notice during my sojourn 6 years ago. There seems to be a "real" Berlin and a fake one... or just countless faces of the same city. And some of the Berliners I met felt uncomfortable with the new faces cropping up, saying that what I was seeing wasn't the "real" Berlin. I saw: a Berlin for grungy American ex-pats who try too hard to be hip, a Berlin that's "schicky micky" (my favorite new word), a Berlin whose inhabitants love it nomatter how it looks, a Berlin filled with tourists, a Berlin that is New Istanbul, a seedy Berlin, and a Berlin that's just a giant nondescript city full of people. Part of this diversity stems from the city's history as an array of different towns that eventually merged into a single city. Part of it stems from the shadow of its East-West divide, which leaves many Berliners still proud of their allegiance to this day. And part of it is just the weird character of a weird city that leaves me with a jumble of mismatched photos.

On my first night, I drank tropical-flavored Ghanaian beers out of a gourd. 

The street I lived on in Kreuzberg, owing to the extreme generosity of a guest-professor-emeritus on vacation. 

A park next to the apartment.

A street nearby.

Kreuzberg: land of cuteness and cobbled streets that destroyed one of my suitcase wheels. I had to perform emergency surgery in the subway en route to Salzburg. 

At one point during my stay, I rode my bike through Tempelhof, which used to be an airport and is now a giant empty field. It was a bizarre place, more post-apocalyptic than anywhere I've been before. The airport itself is a deserted building with an airplane perched sadly in front. People ride their bikes and steer robot-controlled cars along the former runways. The whole place is filled with chirping grasshoppers and giant kites soaring through the sky. Guys enter the park and immediately strip off their shirts, as if normal rules of clothing no longer applied. Elderly couples with an astonishingly dark tan bask near-naked in the sun. And several areas have houses and gardens where anarchists or libertarians or hippies are living, hammering at salvaged wood or relaxing in the shade of an outstretched tarp.

Biking on the runway.

Kites everywhere.

The old airport.

Open field.

The village.

A public resting space in the village square.

A place to buy beer.

A mini-golf course and/or art installation made out of found objects.

Gardens decorated with sculptures made from salvaged materials.

The strangest thing of all was that this post-acocalyptic place is nestled in the middle of Berlin, a mere 5 minutes bike ride away from where I was staying. The next day, I visited a similar commune/beergarden in Neukölln, located on the rooftop of a nondescript shopping mall.

Hexagonal gardens.

 The place turned out to be closed, but there were a bunch of people building things... exactly what, I don't know.

The view from the top parking deck: Neukölln from above.

Other parts of Berlin are considerably more manicured, like the Bellevue Palace. 

A pleasant spot by the Spree.

I spent as little time as possible in the Mitte, for the simple reason that they're putting in a new subway line and the entire Unter den Linden street is torn up. The main Museum-Insel area is so filled with construction that it was actively unpleasant to walk around.

They try to make the construction look prettier with these cartoonish facades.

An extremely depressing, but also beautifully designed Holocaust exhibit near the Reichstag.

I re-visited the Neue Synagoge, which I had seen six years before from the outside. Last time I regretted that I hadn't had time for a tour, so this time I tried to see the interior... but it turns out they don't give tours of the main areas.

The Neue Synagoge from up close.

The stairwell.

The synagogue was reconstructed from rubble after a WWII bombing. You can see how little of the original was left. 

In the top dome, we weren't allowed to take pictures, but I snapped one hastily anyway. 

And then, of course, more random things that don't fit into a story of any kind...

The tiniest car ever. The driver was glaring at me while I took the photo. 

Canal in Tiergarten at sunset.

The randomest of all: an extremely annoying nose-flute concert. It was funny for about five minutes. For those who don't know what a nose flute is (I envy you).

Finally, I spent a super fun day in Prenzlauerberg with a friend who was kind enough to take me around on a personal tour. 

Kitty snoozing in front of a gardening store.

Oh look, I exist.

And... that's Berlin, I guess. I also did some research in the StaBi. But alas, it's very late and I have an appointment with an archivist early tomorrow morning in the broiling city of Salzburg, so I have to truncate the post here. 

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*And also because these posts take me hours to write and I rarely have the time or energy. It's so much easier to just eat Haribo and re-read the Harry Potter series... oh wait, I just finished the last book. Damn.