Berlin

May, 2002

They’re building up Berlin at breakneck speed, all day, every day.

And they’re managing to do it properly.

The GDR TV tower, which appears to have been built to make it easier to look at the Western part of the city through binoculars, hasn’t changed a bit since it went up.

A group of GDR-era chefs survived and are cooking roughly the same meal you get in the restaurant car on the Moscow-Bumfuck-nowhere train (" — Lyuda, get me one beef tongue!“). Hungarian peas (“Globus” brand), breaded (it hides the meat’s shortcomings) pigskin leather insole, cucumber (raped into the shape of a rose), potatoes (wet with suffocation). Bottled beer. On the bright side, the restaurant stays open until 1 a.m. It also rotates. It isn’t a pleasant feeling — you don’t want to be spinning against your will when you’re up that high.

An actual airship flies over the city. It leaves a futuristic impression of the sort no plane can muster.

Street sign.

Postbox.

Dogs are not allowed to leave five turds.

There are some of the most idiotic pictograms I’ve even come across drawn on the pedestrian traffic lights.

They don’t accept credit cards in most shops (even in large shopping centres). They hand back your “Visa” and demand cash, or a debit card. They’re perfectly happy to accept your “Maestro”.

All of the large shops look like Soviet department stores (GUM/TsUM) more than anything else — the same tills, the same cashiers, the same product offering, everything shoddily displayed. Small stores are way better.

You have to queue for sixty to ninety minutes to get into the Reichstag. Then you’re shooed into a filter with glass doors and through a metal detector. The security guard pats down men and women alike. He pulled up my trouser legs and checked my ankles — to make sure I hadn’t taped grenades to them. He made me show him the soles of my shoes — just to be certain I hadn’t hidden any TNT bricks there. He then spent a long time studying the contents of my backpack.

Then the lift climbs upwards to the Reichstag’s dome, of which there wasn’t one for the last forty years. The dome is very nice. The way the spirals are done is very interesting — they alternate. You use one to go up, the other to go down. When you look at them, you don’t notice this. But when you go up and see those who are going down, for some reason they don’t get in your way. It’s because they’re on a different path.

The entire roof of the Reichstag is covered in solar panels (they’re environmentally-friendly and all that). The building itself uses plant oil-based cogeneration. I didn’t see any messages penned by Soviet soldiers, although I’d heard that they’re here somewhere.

There is practically nowhere to have lunch in the morning in Berlin.