Sunday dawned sunny with a hint of a cool breeze, just a pleasant hot summer day rather than the oppressive pre-storm heat of Saturday. I’d “done” the important expected sights; I could just go off into Berlin and please myself. Breakfast would be a good start. Being Sunday, all the little supermarkets were closed except the one in the main station, so I took a tram two stops down to there and found the mini Rewe, which was predictably heaving. I found a large bottle of orange juice and although I couldn’t find a cinnamon roll through the hoards around the pastries, I did find a croissant and managed to jump the queue for payment by going to the self-service machines. Then I got on the U-Bahn and headed for Museumsinsel on the grounds that I always like a cathedral.
Surfacing opposite Berlin’s… well, Neo-Renaissance monstrosity, I found a bench under a row of trees which would make an ideal spot to eat my breakfast. It was still fairly early, the tourists not getting going until at least mid-morning. I tore a piece off my croissant. It tasted odd. Unpleasant, almost. Another piece. Was it the butter they’d made it with? Was it lard? Was I just being picky? Had I forgotten what croissants taste like? I slid it back into its bag and happened to glance down at it for the first time as it went in, one end entirely torn off, exposing the centre. It wasn’t an innocent butter croissant but packed with cheese and ham. I have not eaten meat since I was old enough to decide for myself what goes in my mouth except the occasion when my mum gave me ham sandwiches instead of cheese on a school trip to Putlake Farm when I was about six, hoping I’d be too excited to notice I was eating a dead animal instead of an animal by-product. I was not too excited. And now I’d come this close to doing it again to myself. No wonder it had tasted grim. No breakfast for me, then. I disposed of the croissant, tried to get the meaty taste out of my mouth with orange juice and went to explore the cathedral.
The trouble with turning up at a working church on a Sunday is that’s the day churches work. It wasn’t open to tourists until later on in the day. I decided to do a little circuit of the district and make my way back to the U-Bahn to head elsewhere. But first I crossed the street, past the magnificent Humboldt Forum, past a mysterious three-sided brick tower with one side open to the elements and then I found a nice Gothic church. I’m not a Renaissance girl. I like a bit of Gothic. Was this one open? Yes, it was – it wasn’t a working church but an art gallery and so I slipped inside.
I had enjoyed Badeschiff on Saturday afternoon and this church was strong competition for my favourite thing in Berlin. The outside is rather angular red brick but the inside is full of a golden-yellow light, slender yellowish pillars soaring up to a ceiling of tiny red bricks supported on wide but pointed arches and given a hint of colour by the intricate blue stained glass windows in the east end. I could not have cared less about the hundred or so marble statues littering the floor. I was completely struck by the architecture of the place. It was recognisably Gothic but not a style of Gothic I’ve ever seen before and I really liked it. See, this is why I couldn’t love Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building – they just don’t tickle the architectural part of my brain. You never can predict what someone’s going to love and what they’re not and I would never have guessed that the bit of Berlin I was going to fall head over heels in love with was a small random art gallery in a decommissioned church.
The lady on the desk had spotted me in raptures, buying postcards and started chatting. Where was I from? Where was I going? What had I seen? Would I like to buy a book about the church? Honestly, I would, but the thing was about £30 and would easily have taken up 25% of my luggage space. I wished I was brave enough to take a photo of the front so I could buy it online when I got home. This nice lady showed me various pictures from the book, explained that, like many things, this had been bombed in the war and reconstructed, the significance of certain sculptures and then, remembering the brick tower that didn’t look entirely unlike this church, I enquired – did she know what it was and why it only had two sides? She didn’t know what I was talking about. I think if I worked here and someone asked about the two-sided triangular tower just across the road, it might stick in my brain. Luckily, I had a photo of it to show her and then it all unlocked. Ah yes, that was built by the same architect who’d built the church, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The tower is all that remains of his Bauakademie, the Berlin Building Academy, an art & architecture school built in the 1830s, bombed badly in the war and demolished in the 60s, all but the two sides of one of the towers on the front. There are plans underway to rebuild it.
I took the long way back to the U-Bahn via the Neo-Classical Berlin State Opera, the Neue Wache war memorial and the German Historical Museum before looking back to realise I was on the long and leafy Paris-style boulevard that ends at Brandenburg Gate. There, a little piece of Berlin above-ground geography slotted into place in my brain!
My next plan was a boat trip. I like a boat trip and my parents, who are regular visitors to Berlin, recommended a boat trip. As far as I could see, they were all much the same, so it depended either what kind of boat you prefer, what time you wanted to go and how much you wanted to pay. Or how far you wanted to walk, maybe. I took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz with half an eye to seeing the TV tower – no plans to go up it but maybe I should have done – and then to seeing the Rotes Rathaus, the red brick town hall. Yes, I’m deeply predictable. If it’s red brick, I’m probably going to love it. It made a fun optical illusion – as I stood and stared up at it, the clouds moving high overhead made the entire building look like it was coming at me. “Fun” optical illusion? “Surprisingly dizzying” optical illusion, more like. Then I took a little diversion through what I believe counts for the only real surviving bit of Berlin’s old town, mostly because another Gothic church caught my eye. This one is an art gallery with an entry fee and I wasn’t particularly interested. Looking at the interior pictures on Google Maps, it wasn’t really worth the fee or the effort, so I continued wandering. I’d now reached the river and I could stroll along it until I found a suitable boat.
The suitable boat had a retractable glass roof, tiny thin tables and a lady taking payment who had bright pink and blue hair. We had a while before we set off, long enough for a waiter to go round taking orders for drinks – and then for it to start to rain. And when I say rain, I mean the heavens opened. The waiter promptly abandoned the drinks to drag the roof closed and there we were, in the dry but also roasting because we were effectively in a greenhouse.
At last we set sail. First we went a little way south, past the old town and towards the locks. You can go further downstream, as I well knew from watching tour boats pass while I swam in Badeschiff (is it even downstream? I have no idea which way the Spree actually flows) but we turned round and sailed back north, past Berlin Cathedral, past the closed Pergamon Museum, under some historic bridges, past Friedrichstrasse and then the government quarter, the massive Hauptbahnhof and the Tiergarten and then turned round and came back. It stopped raining once we’d turned round at the locks so the roof was opened again and the sun came out and really roasted us. I had a drink with me so I drank discreetly and ate mini Babybels, which is one of my favourite travel snacks, because they can take a lot of punishment. But, to be honest, it was just too hot. I certainly spent the entire return journey desperately waiting for us to reach dry land again, just so I could find some shade and eat my nice soft bread rolls and cool down because if I spent any longer gliding along under that sun, I was absolutely going to die.
Lunch was the bread rolls I bought at Rewe this morning under a tree in James-Simon-Park, a couple of hundred metres from the boat, sitting on the waterproof coat I’d been carrying around and that was wonderful. I was starving, my breakfast had been a disaster, I was hot and tired and to just sit by the riverside was a lovely way to spend half an hour. Then I ambled back via the cathedral, down Under Den Linden to Brandenburg Gate again (still surrounded by fences but Pride was over and so it was all a lot quieter) and then I made my way round to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
That was a very odd thing. It’s a patch of Berlin with very uneven ground, a weird-shaped hill with concrete slabs of various sizes making a labyrinth around it. Some are short enough to sit on. Some look short enough to sit on until you discover that they’re in one of the dips and so they’re actually twelve feet tall. It’s a memorial, you’re supposed to be quiet and respectful and one thing you’re absolutely not supposed to do is climb up and run from one stone to the other like it’s a playground. Obviously, this was all children but the parents are supposed to not let them do that. It’s very offputting trying to attend a memorial while scowling at children leaping all over it – not least because I’m horribly aware of how high some of these stones are and how high those gaps are that they’re casually jumping on.
After that, I thought I’d call it a day and go back to my hotel to eat and to pack and to recharge both my feet and my camera. But then I began to think “what if I’ve missed something obvious?”. So I googled “must-dos in Berlin”. Mostly that came up with the things I’d seen or things I hadn’t had the time or energy to do, like Charlottenburg Palace or wandering Tiergarten, so I was reasonably satisfied that I’d done most of what I’d be expected to do in my two days. Then I came across Liquidrom. It’s not a Berlin must-do by any means but it fitted my vision of Modern Techno & Docs Berlin and it featured hot water baths. Could I get a ticket? Would it be sold out? No, it wasn’t. I grabbed my swimming stuff, still damp from yesterday, and fled the hotel there and then. That one also got its own blog post so I won’t go into detail here. It’s enough to say that it was an underground thermal bath with music you can just about hear under the water, an outdoor pool and a textile-free sauna area.
And that was it. By the time I got home, I really had to get on with my packing and go to bed because in the morning, I’d be off to Poland.