Well, my first and only entire day in Berlin was a full one.

It started when I slept through my watch alarm just long enough to miss the 9:30 a.m. Berlin Walks tour. Counting on the 14:00 tour, I ate breakfast at the Hostel and read my Lonely Planet guide to see what Berlin offers a passportless tourist.

I didn't get to the Picasso exhibit the night before because after I stood up from the Internet terminal I noticed it was raining very hard, and I had forgotten to bring my jacket. So I ducked into a theater around the corner and saw the only movie not dubbed into German. It was City of Angels, with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan. I'd advise you all to hurry out and not see the movie. It was horrible. The best part of the movie was seeing a rat run out from the wall next to me, sniff at the floor and ran back into it's hole with a Jujubee candy.

I went home after the movie only slightly damp from the steady drizzle and fell asleep.

Satiated with three cups of coffee and a buttered roll this morning, I hopped on the U-Bahn train toward the Schloss Charlottenburg, a castle built in the mid-1700s. Outside it was cool and mostly cloudy and a taste of autumn was in the air. It was nice to be a tourist without sweating and drinking bottled water all day. The weather made me look foward to fall.

Schloss Charlottenburg was a huge castle built by Friederich II as royal winter quarters along the Spree River. It houses an impressive collection of portraits of German nobility who had a passing resemblance to George and Martha Washington. One of Friedrich's final wishes, apparently, was to declare that nobody who enters his castle can carry his or her coat around his or her arm. I found this out when I was strolling through the rooms looking mostly out the windows at a beautiful view of the French and English gardens and a guard approached me. He said, in German,

"The Great Elector has asked that nobody carry his coat while strolling through his caslte. Please put your coat back on your body."

I looked at him blankly, figuring he was telling me to find a proper recepticle for my chewing gum. I said "Sprieken ze English?"

He shook his head, pointed at my jacket and said something else in German. Probably, "You can't carry the jacket, under orders of the Great Elector." Then he pantomimed that my two choices were to put the jacket on, or tie it around my waist. Accompanying this pantomime was the helpful explanation:

"Zoh ou Zoh." which I gathered meant "This or This."

I chose "Zoh" and tied the jacket around my waist because it was a bit warm in the Great Elector's house. It was his winter quarters, after all. Another theory about this rule is that the Great Elector used to tell his Consorts: "I'm cold, put on a sweater."

Bored finally from the baroque rooms and dark paintings of German nobility in the 18th century, I retrieved my bag from the 2DM bag check, walked around the gardens a bit and further enjoyed the fall-like weather with my jacket squarely on.

I then walked to the Egyptian Museum, which housed an impressive collection of Egyptian antiquties. They were plundered from tombs by German archeologists in 1912 who looked in the black and white photos just like the bad guys in Indiana Jones movies.

One of Indy's funniest lines in the second movie as the Nazi bad guy stole a gold cross after Indy risked his life to get it was: "It belongs in a museum!"

While I certainly agree a museum is better than the Fuhrer's private chambers, the massive tomb walls and huge number of mummies that the Germans stole from Egypt made me think that the collection belongs back in the tomb where the Kings and Queens who build the tombs wanted to rest for eternity. I had an uneasy feeling that the Sun God was pissed that his shrine was stolen from Egypt and that's why Germany lost two World Wars. With that thought, I crossed the street to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to see some Picasso.

It was an impressive retrospective, spanning from the turn of the century to the early 1970s. I don't know enough about Picasso to truly appreciate the meaning of his work, but it was enough of a thrill just to see how it developed over 70 years. One couldn't help appreciating his drawing skills either.

Picasso Sketch

Most impressive, I thought, was a little page from one of his sketch books of random faces, dogs, ducks, soldiers and a bunny rabbit. I also wondered what his models must have felt like after they posed for a picture in his Cubist years and he portrayed them generally as fat, ugly women with an eye and a nostril or two severed from their faces.

After three floors of Picasso I ascended to the fourth floor and was blown away by a wonderful surprise: a collection of Paul Klee work on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Picasso seemed like his show was just the warm up act for the Klee collection. I stayed for a long time admiring his work with the happy knowledge that I could easily see them again when they return to New York in November.

Inspired, I stopped off at the gift shop and browsed through the posters. As usual, my favorite works from the exhibit weren't depicted on the posters, but I chose a few postcards of the works I liked and bought a poster of one of the works I liked almost as much. It was a bargain at only 27DM (about $20 US) for a poster, 5 postcards and a shipping tube. In addition to the Klee work on the poster, there are German words describing the exhibit and the name of the musuem, so onced framed it'll be a nice addition to my collection of original Linda Press works.

I left the museum in a great mood, though quite hungry. As I opened the door, sunshine greeted me and I smiled happily as I strolled down a wide, tree-lined boulevard toward the Berlin Walks tour. It's the little pleasures like this that make losing your passport seem like an insignificant hiccup in a great trip. For the first time, I felt serious reservations about returning to America and my cubicle.

I grabbed a bratwurst at the main train station on the way to rendezvous with the tour. A group of about 12 people surrounded the tour guide, paying him 10DM for a three hour tour. Our guide was Greg, he informed us, and this was his last tour before flying back to the States to attend Journalism School at Columbia University.

We began by trying to get on the metro to go 5 stops to Friedrichstrasse and begin the proper tour after a small introduction. But the train was not running for an hour. German trains no longer run on time. So we had to take a bus to get to the Friedrichstrasse train station that served as the entry point for West German families to visit their East German grandmothers during the Cold War. Fortunately the bus we took is the scenic bus tour that drives down most of the big monuments in Berlin and Greg was flexible enough to point out sights that normally are not included in the tour.

The Wall

From the Friedrichstrasse metro stop, where Greg explained the basic history of Berlin from WWII to the end of the Cold War, we came across a piece of the former Berlin Wall. It was about 10 feet high and maybe 6 feet long, not in it's original place and covered in Graffiti. Rather unimpressive.

We moved quickly from there to East Berlin and the former Jewish Quarter, where a magnificient synagogue managed to survive the Nazis. Ironically, however, it did not survive the Allied bombing of Berlin. It was only reconstructed recently, as the Communists just let a forest of trees grow inside for 40 years.

From there we moved to Museum Island. Lots of huge musuems here, some still showing artillery and machine gun scars from the bloody Russian conquest of Berlin in 1945.

Which one of these buildings doesn't belong? (Note: it won't be there much longer.)

Then it was onto the Royal Palace grounds with magnificent buildings constructed by the last Kaiser of Germany. He was forced to abdicate after WWI, and the East Germans decided to demolish half of the buildings of this Imperial Royalist Pig and replace them with utterly horrid looking government buildings. Perhaps the greatest single event of the reunification of Berlin will be in the next couple of years when the government tears down these buildings.

It was only a short walk to Humboldt University, where Albert Einstein used to teach before fleeing the Nazis in 1932. Across the road is the square where the famous Nazi bookburnings took place. Two unobtrusive small bronze plaques sit in the middle of the square. One explains in German what happened, and the other was a quote from a great German philosopher who wrote about 100 years before the Nazis came to power. It said, to paraphrase, "When you start burning books, you pave the way for burning people."

About 20 meters from this plaque was a brilliant memorial about the bookburnings built recently by an Israeli. Most people probably walk right over it or by it without knowing the significance. There were no signs explaining it. It was simply a large piece of glass, about 10 square feet, with a turqoise frame sunken into the ground. Underneath the glass was a bare white room maybe 20 feet deep. It was lined with empty bookshelves. Just enough shelves, Greg informed us, to house the 20,000 books that Hitler burned. It was the tomb of the unknown books, and it's simplicity made a powerful statement.

A quick look at the Brandenburg gate, where President Kennedy famously said "Ich bein ein Berliner." Greg informed us that the "ein" makes for a sentence that is not proper German, and the direct translation actually means "I am a jelly donut!"

From there we stopped for some Bratwust at a cafe, and Greg and I agreed to get together in NYC so I can give him a tour of the city. I promised not to charge him. Refreshed, we saw a few Opera houses, walked along the Unter den Linden road where Hitler liked to march his troops, and stopped at the Holocaust memorial site.

There is no building there yet, and it sounds like it will be some time before construction will begin. There is a big cultural battle between the two parties hoping to win the national election in a month about what sort of memorial to build. Adding to the controversy is the bunker of Goebbels (sp?) the Nazi propaganda minister. When they began excavating the site, the uncovered the bunker. Now there is a battle over how, or if, to incorporate the bunker into the site. "Come back in 10 years," Greg said, "and maybe this huge patch of land will have something built on it. But don't cross your fingers."

It was a short walk to the site of Hitler's bunker. The Soviets filled the bunker where Hitler shot himself. His last will and testament blamed the Jews for the defeat of Germany. There was a minivan parked just over the spot where he and Eva Braun took cyanide then shot themselves and Hitler's dog in the head for good measure.

We finished at Potsdamer Platz, the largest construction site in Europe. The Berlin Wall used to sit on this 900 meter wide strech of land. In a fitting tribute to the victory of capitalism over the forces of darkness, multi-national companies like Mercedes and Sony are constructing massive, high-tech modern complexes to house their European operations. Take that, Karl Marx!

The tour ended, and Greg was the first tour guide I've had who didn't ask for a tip. I felt guilty leaving without giving him something. So I told him I'd buy him a beer in NYC as the rest of the tour group started to melt away. A Frenchman whose name I never learned and a Canadian woman from Whistler named Melanie and I moved on to the museum commemorating Checkpoint Charlie and the people who tried to break over, under and through the Berlin Wall.

It was an unorganized mishmash of huge photos, badly but humorously translated descriptions of escape attempts, cars and refrigerators that people hid in to cross the border and chunks of the wall for sale. It was a lot to take after the exhausting tour, but we persevered and left with the unmistakable feeling that the right side won the Cold War. The thought of a government building a wall to keep it's people from escaping oppression drives home the unnatural and misconstrued nature of Soviet-style communism. People and information yearns to be free, the three of us decided on the way to a restaurant, and we agreed that hopefully the Chinese people will gain their freedom in a spectacular nonviolent revolution like the one that took place here only 10 years ago.

Famished, damp and cold we went back to the hostel so Melanie could exchange her shorts for pants and so I could put on a comfortable pair of shoes. We asked at the front desk for a local restaurant, and the guy thought the only thing open at 10:00 p.m. was an Italian place just down the street. We were shocked that it was already 10:00 p.m.

We got some cash at the machine and walked down to the Trattoria. Our hostel passes allowed us to get spagetti, lasagne or another dish for 10DM. We asked for the wine list, and the waiter/owner explained that there was no wine or beer. We were quite surprised, especially since the two gentlemen sitting right next to us were drinking tall cold ones. Further hand gestures indicated that he meant wine wasn't included in the 10DM price.

That was okay with us, so we ordered a bottle of the house wine. He delivered it, and we went through the wine tasting ritual. I didn't really like the smell of the wine, but it tasted very nice, if a bit woody. It had a nice finish, which closed the deal. I pronounced it fine, and then looked at the label after he poured glasses for Melanie and Frenchguy. It was Spanish wine.

On my last night in Germany, I was eating Italian food and drinking Spanish wine with a Canadian and a Frenchman. I'll have fond memories of that dinner, as my two companions were among the first people I've spoken too in the last two and half weeks who are not just out of college. We enjoyed easy, winding intelligent conversation about all sorts of topics. We covered the differences between welfare and healthcare systems in our three countries and what sort of people and cultures we have all encountered on our travels. Like the wine, it was a perfect finish to my European adventures in the summer of 1998.

--Ken

*****

Well, thus ends my e-mail dispatches from Europe. I doubt I'll have time to write from my overnight stay in Amsterdam. I wanted to thank all of you for reading them and for sending encouraging replies while I shared my adventures with you.