Due to various circumstances, I couldn't write in the evenings in Berlin, so here's the rundown.
The next day, I went to the Museumsinsel (Museum Island), where the antiquities are kept. This was in East Berlin, and was the first place that sort of fit with my dad's description of the place (although this is deliberate due to the museums being reliquaries for history). The facade of the Neues Museum bears witness to the horrific onslaught of small arms fire it took in the war, and the once gorgeous frescoes inside are mostly broken and ruined due to 44 years of East Germany not fixing shit. It does add to the ambiance though. Sadly, the Neues Museum does not have nearly as impressive of a collection of Egyptian stuff as the British Museum or Louvre. However, it does have a fabulous collection of ancient papyrus, the famed painted bust of Nefertiti, and the parts of Heinrich Schliemann's findings from Troy that the Soviets didn't loot. The ancient Greek stuff is unremarkable.
This is because if you want to see Greek stuff, you go to the next door Pergamon Museum. The line will be long if you don't get a timed ticket or go early, but it's worth it. The museum has a reconstruction of the legendary Ishtar Gate that includes some of the original shattered bits they found of it, and reconstructed Roman columns and a temple facade. But none of this is why it is called the Pergamon museum. That name comes from the room in which they built a reconstruction of the Pergamon Altar from Greece. On the altar and on the walls are the original remnants of the famed Gigantomachy that once adorned the original, and climbing the steps to the second level of the altar will lead you to the Telephos Frieze, again the original from Pergamon. In my opinion, the Greeks should be more pissed about not having this than about the silly blown up bits of the Parthenon, as this is all done in high relief, and is probably in better shape than the Elgin Marbles.
After that, I decided to go see the old center of East Berlin, Alexanderplatz. This was supposed to be all scary and foreboding, but capitalism has not been kind to the Eastern Bloc architecture. A fair amount has been demolished and replaced with modern glass and matte black structures, and there's cell phone stores and big western clothing chains and other things that don't really scream socialism. Completely ruining the former atmosphere was the African street festival and the German guys rapping. If the guidebook hadn't told me what it used to be, you wouldn't figure it out now.
If you want to see Eastern Bloc architecture, go a bit east of that to Karl Marx Allee. This must have been the main drag back in the day, because the street is absurdly wide, considering that people were just going to be driving puny-ass Trabants on it. It fits a bike lane in each direction, two lanes of traffic, and has two rows of parking spots right down the middle. Set back from this are massive blocks of apartments that are just plain and symmetric (because color and decorative brickwork is for decadent capitalists). This has been left as-is, because building stuff like what has been done in...
Kurfurstendamm would look fucking stupid. Few buildings remain there that appear younger than me. In place of the bars and clubs that were there in the 70s, there are chain stores and expensive restaurants and a BMW motorcycle boutique. All of the stuff for young people has moved east, to places like the area around...
Gorlitzer Park, which is in West Berlin, but on the east side (the Soviets only got about a quarterish of the city). I went here because June 14th was Reddit meetup day. I had a good time barbecuing and drinking with an eclectic mix of American ex-pats, foreigners from the less rebellious colonies, and several native Germans. At 2AM, I left the bar, and took the train back to my place, because the trains in Berlin never stop on weekends. They need it because Berlin loves its vices. Gorlitzer Park itself is surrounded by young African men trying to sell you weed, and people don't care much about if a joint gets lit in public or out at a bar or whatnot. It is also legal to walk around drinking beer openly and on the train, and I was solicited by four or five prostitutes while I was there. In America, this level of debauchery would scare the shit out of me, because back home this level of lack of control would inevitably end in violence. Here, people just sort of smile, do their own thing, and it doesn't feel unsafe despite the presence of numerous things that in America usually signal that it's time to leave before things explode. I left Berlin feeling like I had barely scratched the surface of the place, and that another visit would be nice in a few years as the city hides more and more evidence of the old divisions and reinvents itself as another great young people's town.
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