In the golf course across the river from me is a lone maple tree nestled in among the cedars. It is visible from my kitchen window and every fall its bright red leaves remind me, as I have my morning coffee, that I have my fall chores to do.
When I arrived home from Berlin the usual leafy extravaganva awaited me. My (so called) lawn is a sea of leaves, but there are still lots on the trees awaiting to decend. There is a lot of leaf raking in my future, but I’ll wait till more of them are on the ground.
Now that I’m home I can create the panoramic view of Olympiastadion that I tried to do and failed while travelling.
Ths entry is a collection of shots of bicycles we’ve seen in Berlin over the last 2 weeks. The one pictured above, we first saw in use with six people all pedalling away, some of whom were travelling backwards. I didn’t have the presence of mind to capture that image, but saw this bike again the other day, sans riders.
Below are other bike images from over the past two weeks.
Call a Bike is run by Deutch Bahn, the German National Railway. If a bike is available (has a blinking green light) then, if you have subscribed to the service, you can call a number to get an unlock code and take it. You pay by the minute, day or week.
Weather resistant pedal power.
I’m not exactly why I liked this image, but I can imagine what these women are waiting for.
Karen saw this bike, You wouldn’t want too big a passenger.
We saw this on our last night in Berlin. Sorry, it’s a bit dark and my image processing facilities are limited. We saw lots of bikes built for special transportation needs. It wasn’t till near the end of our trip that I decided to try to collect images of the various bikes we saw. Too bad, because I missed some doozies.
The East Side Gallery is over a kilometre of Berlin wall where artists painted their response to its fall in 1989. The paintings have deteriorated over the last 20 years, but a restoration project started this year has returned many to their former splendor. Unfortunately the graffitti has started to return these to their normal tattered state. I guess it is a cyclical work of public art.
I visited the Nue Nationalgalerie today and enjoyed it more than the Hamburger Bahnhof. The image above is of a painting by Edward Munch. It reminded me of the style of one of our national iconic painters. Which one?
My original plan for today was to visit the Nue Nationalgalerie. Karen was to do her own thing today. After I had breaksfast and started figuring out my travel plan, I realized all galleries are closed on Mondays – so change in plan. Karen and I decided to visit the area around the Bundestag, walk through Tiergarten, visit KaDeWe and then go to the football game we had purchased tickets for last week. In the shot above is the Bundestag with its viewing dome on top. We had planned to go up there but the lineup was so long that we passed.
Below are some other shots from our day:
Above is Karen shooting me and me her as we arrived near the Bundestag.
We stopped for a snack on our way over to KaDeWe. As we sat outside this Cafe I was admiring the design of the hotel across the street and noticed this arrangement of elements. It took a few shots to get a bike rider in the frame properly.
We finally got to KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens or Department Store of the West). KaDeWe is a an 8 floor temple of consumerism. It’s one saving grace is that it has free washrooms – a rare commodity in Berlin. We had a coffee and some truffles.
We finally got to the game at the Olympiastadion, built originally for the 1936 Olympics. It is a beautiful facility – easy to get into and out of. The stadium wasn’t full but the crowd was amazing for a second tier team. In football terms it may have been a good game, but for an uninformed canuck, the 0-0 tie seemed to take forever to complete. The first shot above is of the end of the stadium where the home town fanatics stood, yelled, cheered, sang, waved flags, stamped, thumped and, I presume, drank copious quantities of beer, constantly throughout the game. The crowd was loud and boisterous, but I didn’t see any violence or unruly behaviour.
The second shot is of Karen and me sporting our Hertha BSC scarves that we had purchased at the Mauerpark Market yesterday.
We visited the Mauerpark market again today. It was much busier than last sunday – probably due to the sunny weather today and the fact that it is October 3 – German Reunification Day. The market was much busier – almost impossible to move around, let alone take pictures. I did get a few – here’s another.
Next to the market is Mauerpark itself. Compared to last week, Mauerpark was hopping. There were lots of people just enjoying the sun (and drinking beer which was for sale everywhere) and watching buskers. There was one area that had a huge crowd, so I went to see what was going on.
There was a busker there when I arrived, but very quickly it was clear that he was not the main show. About 5 minutes after I found a seat, in a break between songs, the crowd erupted into applause and a man on a large bicycle/truck contraption arrived and proceeded to set up. Shortly after the karaoke started and the crowd grew even further. The gentleman in the image above was singing “I did it my way” in German.
It turns out that the karaoke is run every Sunday (weather permitting) by a guy who goes by the name of Joe Hatchiban. He has a web site and a youtube channel of some of the performances. It was very entertaining and seemed to epitomize my Berlin experience.
Here are a few more shots from Mauerpark.
These drummers gave a great performance. So much so that the young lad in the foreground woke up and started to pay attention.
For some reason this young man didn’t want me to photograph this table of pastry. Perhaps they though I’d steal their ideas and start up a competitor. Someone else had taken a picture just before me without a reaction.
We spent today shopping and wandering around Prenzlauer Berg. We had a bite at a small Mexican grill (I hesitate to call it a restaurant because it seats about 8 people inside). Although small, it has great food which to me seems very authentic Mexican. We’ve been there 3 times so far and will probably go again.
We also stopped for a coffee along Danziger Strasse where I took this shot of Karen playing with her latest toy. I think she’s getting tired of me taking shots of her. Oh well, that’s the danger of travelling with someone with a camera.
We had done some shopping before lunch and coffee and started carrying on in that vein after. But then we remembered that we had yet to play ping-pong in the park next to our appartment, so we headed back to do that.
In case I gave an excessively negative reaction to our visit to the Hamburger-Bahnhof Gallerie yesterday here’s another shot of an exhibit I enjoyed:
This was part of a collection of large images by Andy Warhol. I also liked the polka dot Mao background the gallery created for it.
It has been cool, overcast and usually rainy for almost a week. Today is the first of what seems to be a few sunny days before the rain returns. We went to the Hamburger-Bahnhof Gallery today and then walked along the River Spree to the Hakescher Market.
Much of the work at the gallery was totally incomprehensible to me. Some was interesting others not so much. Bruce Nauman’s video piece Clown Torture was one of the most interesting. The image above is a shot of 1 of 4 monitors, each showing a clown being distressed in some way. It was very loud, but riveting.
Part of the reason I didn’t enjoy the Bahnof was time pressure. We had a little over 2 hours for the visit, because we got there around 12:30 and had (I thought) a 3:30 appointment to take a guided tour of the Boros collection. It turns out that I had the day wrong for the tour and so we won’t see the collection while we’re here. We did get to spend more time outside in the sun though.
The image above is of the building (bunker) where we didn’t get to tour the Boros collection. It looks like there is a nice penthouse on the top floor.
