Trip to Berlin
Arriving at Tempelhof Airport, I instantly smelled Saur Kraut and Eisbein and thus felt the urge for Berliner Weize, so I decided to look around for some German cuisine. There would be no time for couch potatoing. I took the U-Bahn to Unter Den Linden because I could get off the train here to Brandenburger Tor. This is a historical place for several reasons; firstly, this is where The Berlin Wall parted the West from the East; secondly, just behind the Wall you have the German Parliament that was out of function for a number of years and also The Brandenburger Tor. Atop Brandenburger Tor sits a sculpture with horses and an eagle that symbolizes the aspirations for power of Friedrich Wilhelm II.
Here I ran into a woman who looked like Mona Lisa with thick BrushRush lipstick, a bosom like a pair of Howitzers and a smile on her face that seemed to suggest: “me want candy”, so I gave her a Kinder Surprise. As I handed it to her, I said: “Here is a present and congratulations.” She then straightened her swanlike neck, accepted the offer with a “Thank you!”, and flew away like a sparrow. Somewhat bedazzled from previous encounter, I suddenly found myself in a Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was obviously a mistake, as I was looking for German cuisine. There was a bakery across the street and among its many treats I settled on the famous pastry bearing the name of the city I was in, supposedly so good that JFK once declared it his equal; The Berliner - a kind of doughnut without the hole in the middle and filled with marmalade.
If you don't like to fly, you can take the train from Hamburg to Berlin where you have to get off at Berlin Spandau and take the S-Bahn to Bahnhof Zoo or the central station in the middle of Berlin. Now you are at the center of Berlin just around the corner from Kurfürstendamm, a shopping street with lots of large shopping centers where you can easily spend a day. It was also here that a terrorist recently drove a truck into a crowd of people at the Christmas fair of 2016. Not far away you find Olympia Stadium where Adolf Hitler milked the Olympics for political gains in 1936, and left the idea of sports being politically neutral as a naïve thought. To this day, the stadium is still in use and has found its rightful place.
The day after my encounter with Mona Lisa, I went straight to the inner city and had a shopping spree. Then I decided to jump on the S-Bahn and cross the famous river Spree and get out in eastern part of the city in Friedrichstraße with the real posh shops and hotels. The famous five star hotels are all there: Blueberry, Mercury, the Golden Pipewrench, Andorra and Saturn. In amazement of such lavishness, The Scream escaped my open mouth.
By Kenni and dkfelix
An unusual amount of concrete travel info about sights crammed into this piece. That helps keep the non-fiction reading protocol fulfilled, obviously. The incidents and the local color is also quite successfully included. The ending is a bit abrupt and random.
ReplyDeleteAs for ingredients, my first question is why you doubled up on the ingredients? One list out of your two lists was the assignment, so NOT two dead politicians, paintings, planets etc. Anyway, much of the ingredient list is well-integrated and creatively disguised: JFK, howitzers, etc. The weird list of five-star hotels, on the other hand, is a good illustration of how not to do it...
You sounds like someones who has a lot of knowledge about Berlin and your writing becomes sort of a travel guide and a lot of facts is integrated into the travel writing, which adds a lot of realism to the story.
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