One of the murals I was determined to see while in Berlin was this of the astronaut painted by Portugese born, Danish based artist – Victor Ash ( www.victorash.net/ ). I took several shots of the work which is about four-five stories tall. This was my favourite however as it shows the size of the work in relation to the building it is on, and the park in front of it.
Down a side street off the busy commercial hub of Potsdamer Platz is this relic of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War,an East German watchtower. The “panorama observation tower” originally stood between the Brandenburg Gate and Leipziger Platz and served as a base for border guards. Construction of these crenelated type BT 6 watchtowers began in 1966 and there were at one time 200 of them.
Originally a guardhouse in the 1800s, Neue Wache ( or New Guardhouse ) has been a war memorial since the 1930s.
It is really just a single room, containing a single sculpture, an enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son. The sculpture is directly under the oculus ( a round, eye-like opening in the roof ), and so is exposed to the rain, snow and cold of the Berlin climate, symbolising the suffering of civilians during World War II.?
Leibhaftig is a bar that serves Bavarian Tapas, but is also the home of a hausbrauerei, Wanke Brau. At the moment it serves a pilsner and a weissbier, both of which are very good. These are brewed on commission by brewery Schleppzig in the Spreewald, about 60 kms outside Berlin. Talking to Marcus Wanke the brewer, he says he has a rye beer on the go, but only does dark beers in winter.
Market Gate of Miletus – Pergamon Museum – http://bit.ly/1kebVCD
The other two photos here are the Pergamon altar and the Ishtar Gate into Babylon
It is hard to describe the Pergamom Museum for it is unlike most museums that I have visited in that much of its contents are large pieces of ancient buildings which have been rebuilt inside the walls of the museum, and in fact the museum has been designed to house some of these large buildings.
One of the bonuses of getting to Teufelsberg was the opportunity to walk through a small part of the Grunewald forest.
Teufelsberg
I hardly know where to start with describing Teufelsberg (or Devil’s Mountain). I went up there today on a tour led by former US Army analyst Christopher McLarren. McLarren was stationed here at Field Station Berlin during the Cold War and since settling in Berlin, has become an expert on not only it’s history as a listening post, but also on how the mountain was created, and what has happened since the station was closed in the 1990s. It was a fascinating and personal tour dotted with anecdotes of spies caught (Valery Kirukhin) and missed ( James W. Hall )
I’ll write separately about the art work on the site but so far this has been my favourite trip in Berlin, including as it does, a walk through the Grunewald to get there.
Links worth reading
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Our local U-bahn stop is U Eberswalderstrasse. After the first day we stopped bothering with the timetables as we have never waited more than three minutes for a U2 train heading in the direction we wanted to take.
This finch was sitting on the back of the chair across from me – they are quite common in this area and there were a couple having a dust bath where some of the cobbles had come adrift outside our front door.
White asparagus is a seasonal crop, and according to the locals one of the few vegetables that is only found in the shops in April and May. Many restaurants and families have their own recipes for it’s preparation but mostly I’ve found it with a cream sauce.
