Our time remaining in Berlin is short and both Dallin and I are feeling very ready to be back in our Bloomington house (and see our Bloomington dog, who requires much less labor than the two dogs we are taking care of here). I’m in this constant mental battle of trying to appreciate this time abroad and counting down the days until we get home. We have about two weeks left and I’ve finished the to-do list I made while here, so I’m torn between creating another (short) to-do list and…well, simply not.
We hit up several museums over the past couple weeks–when in Rome, right? Berlin has around 170 museums, so it is of course impossible to visit them all while here, but we’ve gotten in a good dozen or so.
The Jewish Museum has been one of my favorite museums we’ve visited. The architect of the museum (Daniel Libeskind) said in 1998, “The official name of the project is ‘Jewish Museum’ but I have named it ‘Between the Lines’ because for me it is about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments, the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely.” The bottom floor feels very abstract in its ways to honor those who were murdered in the Holocaust, and then you move to some general Jewish German history on the top floor, and then you end with the “memory void” (because what can come after the Holocaust?).
I paired with visit to the Jewish Museum with a visit to an undergrad seminar at the FU discussing Holocaust poetry (featuring Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue” and Nelly Sachs’s “O die Schornsteine”--which are two of THE poems of Holocaust). I bring this up mostly to share two comments from undergrads giving short presentations on the poems.
“The Holocaust changed the lives of those of those survived.” (yeah no duh sherlock)
“Nelly Sachs talked about Israel because Jews wished they had been in the country of Israel instead of Europe during the Holocaust.” (even though the state of Israel wasn’t established until 1948?)
We also made it to the Pergamon, where Dallin fan-boyed over the many examples of cuneiform (the earliest writing form) and we both gawked at the Pergamon Altar from the second century BC.
Teddy has become quite the connoisseur of fine things between old temples and small palaces.
We toured the Charlottenburg palace on the west side of Berlin and it was lovely. I had originally intended for us to just walk around the grounds, but Dallin rightly suggested we go inside. I especially loved the interior of the new wing and found myself wondering if I could ever mimic any of the styles for my own future home/palace (spoiler: I cannot).
During one of Teddy’s 3-hour wake windows, we squeezed in a very quick trip to Potsdam. We just walked around and ate ice cream and baked goods before needing to catch a train back, but it was still a nice outing.
Food has been both a great part of a traveling and a great source of anxiety for me. Teddy took a while to warm to solids (namely he has strongly resisted eating anything besides bread until recently), but I still took on the burden of trying to get him interested in various foods for a half hour twice a day. That has gotten better, which is a relief since he’s coming up on 9 months, but somehow it has also been difficult to feed myself. Both figuring out what to make for myself at home and making food choices when we’re out and about have brought me greater anxiety than food has ever before. This has resulted in me eating something quark-based (a yogurt-like substance), fruit, or chocolate for meals more than I’d like to admit.
Anyways, I also hate talking to strangers generally. My little brother made me go through my first drive through when I was a senior in college and it was terrifying. The first time I ordered pizza (also in college), I started by asking “Do you sell pizza?” And all that stress comes after you’ve already made the decision of WHERE to eat. Anyways, all that to say that I had yet another panic attack when we struggled to find food and Teddy was also hungry but I couldn’t find a place to sit to feed him and we were turned away from our favorite pizza place and after finally finding a place that looked decent (some Georgian street food) I tried ordering food and the food stand people only spoke Russian. It’s kind of funny now, but all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe and started crying and well...yeah. Life is sometimes like that.
The easiest food decision of the past week was eating pizza twice because turns out I love European pizza and also I’ve been chasing the perfect margherita pizza ever since a transcendent experience in–you guessed it–Niagara Falls (long story…actually wait, no, that’s basically the whole story). One of the pizzas delivered, the other was still good, but more of an excellent cheese pizza than margherita.
Oh, also PS one month ago we also went to the Berlin Zoo.
You’d think this wasn’t noteworthy since I didn’t bring it up for an entire month, but they had pandas there and that was pretty neat. I simply forgot until now that this happened because, well, it’s just hard to keep track of everything when you're a living being.
No comments:
Post a Comment