Berlin NextBike

Lars and I had quite the experience dealing with our neighbor a week ago.

Our former neighbor is inconsiderate.  He had left to go to a bar and forgot to turn off the tv.  It roared!! Lars and I couldn't sleep at all and knocked on his door to turn it off.  No answer.  We were at our wit's end.  We even dragged our mattress into the bathroom because, with the door closed, we couldn't hear the tv anymore.  The thought of sleeping in the bathroom disgusted us though and we couldn't fall asleep.  At some time around 3:30, our neighbor came home.  He turned off the tv, thank god.  We started to drift to sleep.

Lars turned to me. "I have a bad feeling. That guy always plays rap music when he's drunk, right," He asked me. 

Well, about 10 minutes later, right when I was falling asleep, the guy started playing Jiggy Jiggy and played it for about an hour straight, on replay.  No kidding.  Lars and I hammered on his door, but he wouldn't answer.  I asked Lars to call the police, but Lars didn't want to.  (I don't understand why he didn't think we had a good enough reason to call the cops.)  Another neighbor screamed from the street (in German), "Hey you! Turn the music down!  I'm gonna call the cops if you don't!"  Yeah, well, that never happened.  I guess the yelling neighbor was bluffing.

Lars, Charlie and I loaded into the car, exhausted, and headed for Berlin. We drove to a hotel in the part of the city called Charlottenburg, in former West Berlin.  And we tried to get some sleep, even though it was already morning.  I think we still got a lot out of our trip to Berlin and made the best out of a bad start to the weekend.

Below is a description of the things we saw and did in Berlin that weekend, with my comments.

Hotel Upper Room in Charlottenburg

The hotel exterior and interior are Art-Nouveau.  I think the hanging lights in the foyet/entrance to the building are the original light fixtures because the whole foyet and stairway was really dark.  The lights were so dim.  It reminded me of  of a Victorian house in Kensington, London, that Lars and I toured last year, when we lived in England.

Lars in front of dim turn-of-the-century light fixtures.

Entrance to building with Hotel Upper Room- Art Nouveau dark colors

Tierpark

Later that day, after sleep and food, Lars and I rented some bikes by the hour (!) with the rental company NextBike.  All you have to do is call the company on your cell phone and they give you a bike lock combination for a bike at a specific location.  Then, you ride the bike as much as you want and can even leave the bike at a different location, on the other side of the city and only pay a rate of one euro per hour!  Lars and I biked over to the parliament buildings and train station, taking a short cut through the huge Tierpark, the largest garden in Berlin.

Tierpark and NextBike

Reichstag Berlin

We passed the Reichstag as we rode to the Train Station.  You can see in the next picture how picnickers were picnicking out in front of the public building.  Can you imagine people doing that in front of public buildings in DC or London?  I can't because there are always guards shooing you away there.

The glass dome built on top of the Reichstag was built after WWII.  It represents the transparency of government.  From above, one could look down and see politicians at work.

I believe this is the building where the politians have their offices.

Silver line- Original location of the Berlin Wall

 East meets West. Remember all those fears about the Red East?  Above, Lars is standing in former "East Berlin", about to cross over to "West Berlin".  The silver line represents the original location of the Berlin Wall, before it fell in 1989.  This area must have been a sort of dangerous, sad waste-land until the wall fell.  Now it is the seat of the most powerful politicians in Germany.

Berliner Hauptbahnhof: Berlin Central Train Station

Above is the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, or central train station. Haupt means "central" or "main".  Bahn means  "train" or "lane".  You don't want to confuse the Bahn with the Zug (train) though, because one is light rail in the city and one is fast rail for transportation between cities.  The Hauptbahnhof in Berlin has three types of trains that stop at the train station: the Zug (from Prague, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Rotterdam, etc) from other cities stops here, the elevated city train (S-Bahn) stops here, and the subway (U-Bahn) goes through too.  The whole thing is like six stories with a shopping mall and fast food, bars, restaurants, etc in between.

 A Hof is a difficult word to describe: it has meany meanings in English but the idea is easy to understand.  At home, the Hof is the porch.  In the city, the Hof is the central area shared by all the tenants in the middle of the building on ground floor and is usually where the trash is kept, bikes are stores, and an occasional garden is built or picnic organized.  That is because German buildings in cities (not in the village though) are built like a square donut with a hole in the middle, similar to  Spanish or arabic houses with a terrassa in the middle, so that all rooms overlook a green area in the middle and every room has a window.  The Hof can also be barn, and I wonder if barns used to be kept in a central storage place, surrounded by pastures, so that it is also a storage or meeting place of sorts.  Anyway, Hof is difficult to translate in English, but it seems to me to be a place of traffic, trade, life and storage.

 Cafes for those who want to have a drink or eat and sit in the sun with a view of the station.  I guess the appeal here is that one can relax and watch other stressed people hurry to catch a train.  I get it.  This would be very appealing to me too and I have sat at restaurants in downtowns and enjoyed watching the business suits go in and out of the buildings with a sort of healthy curiosity and laziness.  It's good to relax and watch it all go by.

 Views from the bridge between the parliament buildings and train station.  Lots of traffic of all kinds: pedestrians, cars, bicicles.

Tempelhofer Park- Site of American Airlift

Lars and I needed to do some  laundry during our trip to Berlin, but on Sunday most places are closed.  I knew of a laundromat in New Cologne, a different neighborhood than where our hotel was and it is in formerly East Berlin.  We decided to go over to the Tempelhofer Airport while we waited for our laundry to finish.

Tempelhofer Airport was the airport where the Americans dropped supplies after WWII.  Now it is a recreational park.  The picture above shows a little garden colony which has been built on the former runways of the airport.

The Airport has a very interesting history.  The Airport was built by the architect Albert Speer.  He is a very important modern German architect, and a Nazi at that.  Hitler intended the Airport to be the entrance to the world capital "Germania".  Before the airport was built (1920's?), officials used eminent domain to displace many residents and even relocated the bodies from graveyards.  How horrible!  I know moving cemeteries and bodies is common-place, but I find it very sad.

Today, the airport is a boundary between the yuppy and up-and-coming neighborhood of Schoeneberg and the largely immigrant-neighborhood of New Cologne.  I hear that New Cologne is becoming a trendy neighborhood for artists and traveling ex-patriots, even Americans.   I lived in New Cologne for about two weeks last January, while looking for English jobs.  I never found a job, and it was too cold to explore the neighborhood in January.  My impression was that it was safe enough (though I may have been ignorant of my own danger), the prices were low, there were lots of low-priced amenities, which were harder to find in the trendy neighborhoods like Kreuzberg, Freidrichshain or Prenzlauerberg.    I liked that nobody gave me a hard time for being an immigrant, and I was treated well.  Still, the neighborhood seemed dirty and poverty was apparent.  I missed the trendy bars and cafes and felt out of place.  My own apartment still had it's original coal-oven for heating (no environmental upgrades) and my shower was in the kitchen (Electric floor heater kept the room luke-warm). To it's advantage, the Tempelhofer park was the sunniest place in Berlin in January, I thought.

All in all, Lars and my weekend in Berlin was pretty fun.  The next week, we had to stand up to our punk neighbor.  I called the police on Sunday night, when the guy starting playing Jiggy Jiggy loud again.  The police came, told him to be quiet and threatened him a little.  As soon as the cops left, the guy slammed on our door, threatened us and turned on his music again!  Lars called the cops then.  Nothing happened to the guy in the end because when the cops came, he heard them and turned off his music. Lars and I moved out the next week!  Whew!