Not my holiday photos II, or, Lessons Learned from a Week in Berlin
1. Do not attempt to cross Unter den Linden in the middle of Gay Pride. You are likely to get run over by someone wearing nothing but peacock feathers, and if they miss you the army of street cleaners following behind to expunge every trace of the parade's existence will definitely take you out.
2. Berlin food is frickin' awesome. If given the opportunity, make sure you order the traditional local winter stodge meal of gigantic pig's knuckle with sauerkraut and potatoes. If it is 35 degrees C and everyone else in the restaurant is looking at you funny as they nibble their salad, hold your head high; it's not like you look like a tourist, after all.
3. Germany makes a lot more sense once you realise that it has been ruled by a succession of Mad Lord Snapcases for approximately four hundred years.
4. Should this require illustration, make sure you visit Potsdam, where the Park of Lunacy (TM) built by Frederick 'Fruitcake' the Great, where you can't take five steps without tripping over a palace, will soon put you on the right track.
5. Should it be 35 degrees outside, make sure you go to the Pergamon Museum first, so you can check out the Totally Awesome Altar before eight million screeching school tours descend, and make it out of the Babylon: Myth und Wahrheit und WTF were they Thinking? exhibition with a few hours to recover your sanity.
6. Marduk dragons are awesome. I want one.
7. The Bode-Museum is a cool, calm, collected and generally fabulous place to sit and sip coffee, because the eight million screeching school tours haven't found it yet.
8. These will make you sad and are really nicely done: the Holocaust memorial, which is like a cross between a maze and a library of giant concrete books, which start small and sun-warmed at the outside and then become tall and cool and monolithic in the middle. They're in a grid shape so you can see all the way along each aisle, and it feels like you're the only person in the world until suddenly a little kid flashes past you, or you come across somebody random standing round the corner.
The little brass cobbles with names outside the homes of people who were taken away. The Empty Library on Bebelplatz which marks the spot where the Nazis burned the books, which is a room with walls made of empty bookshelves, underground in the middle of the square with a glass roof you can look down through.
9. The Communists have the best little green men.
10. Have I mentioned the food? Kaffee und Kuchen. Schnitzel of multifarious kinds. Long lazy Sunday morning brunches which start with eggs and bacon and end with chocolate pudding and jelly.
11. Should you be loitering around the Brandenburg Gate on a weekday, go into the entrance hall of the boring, concrete-fronted DZ Bank building and stare in awe at the insane architecture inside. The Norman Foster cupola on top of the Reichstag is pretty cool as well, if you can be arsed to queue long enough to get in.
12. Do not attempt to find your way around the Deutsches Historisches Museum in chronological order following the numbered signs unless you are extremely good at Sudoku.