A Splendid Saturday

You may think I talk about sleep too much, but when my days are so jam-packed, every pillow minute is a golden slumber of blessing. Saturday morning allowed for no alarm to be set. We had a day to ourselves, to do whatever whenever with whomever. My roommate and official pillowtalk buddy Alana and I arose around 10:45, feeling minimal urgency toward starting the day. We made it out the door around 11:20, with the intention of stopping at a café and then heading over to the Tiergarten for a walk.

I enjoyed a coffee slushie and a minibaguette in Café Ambulanz, the recommended hotspot of a friend who had done the same Close Up trip last summer. After the leisurely brunch, Alana and I walked down classy boulevard Friedrichstrasse and then up Spree river toward the Bundestag. We crossed over to Brandenburgplatz to try for a bathroom break at Hotel Adlon, where Michael Jackson had dangled baby Blanket off the balcony. It’s like the Plaza of Berlin. Now, someone superfamous was there today because the front entrance was mobbed with people held back by security. At the curb, police and limos waited patiently. I was less patient, and entered the building through the restaurant at the side. This may be trespassing, but it was important that I check the key facilities of this luxury hospitality landmark. It seems that as we entered, said celebrity must have exited. The front desk was not able to disclose the identity of the guest of honor, so we’ll never know. But, I can confirm they have delightful handsoap.

Alana and I continued our adventure, stopping outside the US Embassy before ending up at the Deutschland Music Festival. With a killer line-up of tons of bands I’ve never heard of, I was more concerned with taking in the atmosphere. Waffle and currywurst stands, a ferris wheel, and a mainstage with digital screens blocking the view of the impressive Brandenburg gate. In the following hour, we got souvenir political pins, saw a coverband and a hip-hop dance duo, and took a picture with people dressed as not-so-convincing trees. As we attempted to exit the funfair, we ended up on Yitzhak Rabin Strasse. Whattt?! A nice security guard named Yvonne took our picture at this unexpected landmark and told us to return after his shift was over and he’d show us ‘a better time.’

Instead of exchanging contact info with Yvo, we realized it was 1:30 p.m. and power-walked over 3 kilometers back to our hotel to make it for a 1:45 p.m. museum tour meet-up. We were just 6 minutes late, which is probably record speed on that distance of a walk for the 5’2”-and-under category.

Our legs felt mechanical, dragging forward unwillingly toward the Pergamon, Germany’s forefront ancient arts museum. Five of us were handed over by our guide Isabel to museum guide Johannes, an older ruddy dude who just felt uncomfortable to me. After about 20 minutes of dull and awkward history and descriptions in the stuffy crowded Pergamon hall, something changed in front of a Greek friese. As Johannes described the moment of Athena ripping a giant from Mother Earth Gaia, and getting crowned by Nike, he came alive and connected with us through his storytelling. He went from dry to fantastic in a minute and it was confusing, but I’m so glad it happened. I couldn’t have survived the rest of the 90-minute palooza otherwise. 

We saw Hercules and Zeus and a little bit of Ares on the edge of the recovered altar walls, only 3 percent of which are originals intact. We went on to see a three-story Roman market façade, which was 60 percent original and really supercool. Sometimes I forget how much I love ancient stuff in the most nerdy way. We all struggled to imagine what the gate would’ve looked like in full color, and what color Athena’s dress would’ve been in the Greek friese. We got a taste of what it could’ve been like in the next stop, the reconstructed entrance to a Nebuchadnezzarian city fortress, decorated in blue and yellow mythical creatures. Johannes drew connections between Mesopotamian religion, Greek gods, and Judeochristian bible stories seamlessly in ways no one had ever shown me before. All people over history and cultures are inextricably linked and one in the same, it seems. Johannes also drew me back to the great epic of Gilgamesh, upon which many of my Ms. Filley’s 9^th grade English class papers were centered.

By the end of the tour, we were almost sad to bid adieu to Johannes, but Alana and I were ready to go sit in the grass and relax. Eventually, Laura and Laura came to join us and we continued down the block to the Berliner Dom, the city’s main cathedral. Turns out, you can’t see it for free, and as much as I love a cathedral (no, I really, really, really, really do), I wanted to get in without a ticket. This is probably immoral – it takes a lot of money to keep a place like that so gilded. After sneaking halfway in before being scolded and directed out by a guard, Laura H. and I had lost Laura B. and Alana. We walked around trying to find them, but Berlin on a sunny Saturday is crowded, and we can’t just text each other.

Laura H. and I found many other curious sights in the area: a Coke campaign that has popular names on bottles, including Stefanie – with an f, a marvelous rarity for me but apparently not for the Germans; a mysterious looming factory building that wasn’t labeled on our touristy maps; a man wearing a hot dog stand, including a strap-on grill and an umbrella; and, a man in a neon shirt who couldn’t get out of our camera frame of said factory plus a fountain and ruined every shot.

We settled in a café for wifi (known here as W-LAN) and a snack. We rested over pastries and Instagram, me with a croissant and Laura with a mandelbread. We successfully wasted time before crashing 6 p.m. mass for free, back at the church we’d previously been denied from.

Our group had a really fancy dinner at a place called Oxymoron, and then our guides treated us to ice cream and a walk on the Spree at twilight. We arrived at the Centrum Judaicum for the kickoff event to Jewish Culture Week here in Berlin. The synagogue was open to the public with a Havdalah service to end shabbat, a gallery opening, and tours of the chapel, plus an ‘Ask the Rabbi’ session. The event was packed with a couple hundred people from all over Berlin. Over white wine and pflaumkuchen, we made up SNL Stefan skits about Berlin’s hottest club, the Neue Synagogue, and joked about the name of the exhibit, ‘Bleiber?’ which is suspiciously close to Belieber, a term I will not define here. A fellow tripgoer ascended 41 stone spiral stairs into the famous golden Moorish dome, a large open space with clear views of Berlin at night.

When I came home, chocolate, pajamas, packing and writing became the keys to the end of a successful but exhausting day. I’ve got to leave for a train to Dresden in a few hours, so as this post begins, I surrender into the wonder that is my pillow and bid you goodnight.