About a half year after we moved here to western North Carolina, I had the thrilling/chilling opportunity to watch a black bear walk from our neighbor’s yard, down the road to the front of our house, and then down the hill across the street from our driveway. Consequently, we provide a brief “bear warning” note to our guests, describing what to do if you see one out in the “wild.” (Or in our ‘hood!)

So, last Saturday I was hiking at the NC Arboretum, one of my two usual hiking zones. I don’t go out along the Blue Ridge Parkway (the Arboretum is contiguous to it) because I hike alone and don’t want to be in a somewhat isolated area if I fall–and it does occur to me to be wary of wildlife. But, the Arboretum has a lot of visitors, especially on a Saturday, and is fully fenced in, and though I’ve known there have been bears within the fence, I feel generally safe. Well, until Saturday.

So there I was, on a trail no more than 100 yards away from the visitor’s center of the Arboretum, when I heard a rather large leaf-shuffling sound coming from the woods off to my right. There were lots of people around so I didn’t think too much of it, but since it was quite a racket (though no voices), I looked hard into the woods to try to spot the offenders.

Uh-oh. There was a bear, about 50 feet away. I broke all rules of black bear encounters and started to walk quickly on the trail. But that kind of spurred the bear’s curiosity and s/he started to amble toward me. Yikes! So, despite the fact that every molecule in my body was screaming to RUN!!!, I stopped, turned to look at the bear, who was now about 20 feet away (gulp), waved my walking sticks in the air to make me look big, and voila, s/he turned along the trail and walked away from me. Whew!

Now, I know that these bears are not particularly aggressive and if you don’t do anything stupid, like have food on you, they won’t mess with you. But still, they’re big and scary. After my too close encounter, I reported the “sighting” and then still had to walk the mile or so back to my car. I can’t tell you how scary squirrels were on that return trip! The “information lady” to whom I reported my bear noted that the bears have learned how to open the fence gates. Great. I’m thinking I’ll skip the Arboretum for a couple of weeks just to calm down a little.

Normally, I break these “reports” up into separate blogs, but I’m just feeling lazy today, so here’s the whole long thing. Read till you get sick of it! –Linda

Berlin News & Views
June 1-9, 2008

This trip was a new format for us. We stayed in Berlin, in the same hotel(!), for all nine days that we were in Europe. If we’ve ever done that before, we can’t recall it. I must say it was a pleasure, especially since we were in a hotel that had a decently sized room (most European hotel rooms are about the same size as small rooms in the downtown areas of big U.S. cities—for the same reasons; old buildings and expensive real estate).

On this trip we seemed to have found a whole new side of Berlin that we hadn’t experienced in our first, brief trip there several years ago. At that time, we stayed in a different part of the city (in a Four Seasons so it’s not like I was swayed by the accommodations) and for some reason, I didn’t take to the city all that well. It was OK, but I didn’t particularly need to return. But of course, the universe had different ideas.

This time, we found our own hotel since the one that was picked for Jim’s meeting was a little too expensive for a 9-day stay (she says in a blithely understated way). Since it was relatively inexpensive (especially if you ignore the amazing, soaring Euro—or the equally amazing, dropping-like-a-rock dollar), we weren’t at all sure how “bad” it might be. Hah! Great news! It was lovely. And better still, it was in a great neighborhood, full of shops and restaurants and residential zones. In a perfect world, the U-Bahn and S-Bahn (public transit) stops would have been a tad closer, but only Jim would whine about a 10-minute walk! (We can recommend the Holiday Inn Garden Court on Bleibtreustrasse, just off Kurfürstendamm.)(Which reminds me to simply get the obvious complaint, “Why do Germans smoosh their words together to make them so L-O-N-G?” out of my system.)

Not only did we have a grand time being unrepentant tourists (if it’s in the top 10, we saw it!), but the weather was about as perfect as one could ask for—sunny every day, highs in the low 80s, lows in the mid-60s.

On our list of favorites for this trip are Potsdam (a suburb, so technically not “Berlin”), the Gemäldegalerie, the Reichstag and about 10 good restaurants. However, I feel required to note that we visited and enjoyed the zoo, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, the area around Alexanderplatz, Nikolaiviertel, the Pergamon Museum (which was half closed on this trip, but still charging full price), the Botanischer Garten, Potsdamer Platz and KaDeWe, a VERY LARGE department store with a food hall even bigger than London’s Harrods, if you can imagine it (it is here where I discovered yellow kiwis, only to find them in a local grocery store when I got home). I just can’t write about everything (and I’m pretty sure even the two people who read these posts wouldn’t make it to the end).

Reichstag

In order to get a guided tour of the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament, like our Capitol Building, we needed to email a request. We did that, though not terribly far in advance (like 2 days), but still got an official letter giving us our tour time. (Germans are very official.) Of course, we had to bring the letter with us, so we had to find a printer. Fortunately the front desk people at our hotel were very nice and printed it for us.

So, armed with our letter, we arrived for our tour. We had a great tour guide, though why a very handsome, 40-ish, political science Ph.D. is giving tours was a question I was too cowardly to ask. The glass-domed Reichstag is very impressive, making use of the old building that had been vacant since 1930-something (Hitler didn’t use it), burned in 1933 (the Nazis accused the Communists but it seems that it was most likely the Nazis who set the fire), shot up during the Soviet liberation of Berlin (yes, I know, “liberation” is clearly a relative term) in 1945, and saved until Germany would be reunited (now that’s an optimistic crowd). (Bonn was the legislative capital of West Germany until 1990, but it took until 1999 to reconstruct/remodel the building.) Well, sure enough, Germany was reunited and the Bundestag now meets in the impressive Reichstag (the name of the building). The architect did a marvelous job of melding the old (completed in 1894) parts and the shiny new additions. It’s also a very environmentally correct building that produces all of its own energy. (Environmentally sound but very expensive to build—don’t try this at home!) As always, we enjoyed the tour and learned a lot.

Berlin Bits and Pieces

Whenever we travel, especially internationally, there are always little surprises that you, as a foreign traveler, would have no way of knowing. As I mentioned on our Budapest tour, and is also true here, you can travel all you want on the public transportation unless you get caught without a VALIDATED ticket. Then, you get a rather sizable, immediate fine. The signage was much better in Berlin about this, but I was still paranoid about riding without a validated ticket, especially in that time period when we had validated 3-day passes that Jim was theoretically carrying in his shirt pocket but couldn’t find when the occasional “checker” went through our car. We didn’t get a fine, but when we still couldn’t find the tickets by the time of our return trip, I insisted we buy more tickets. Naturally, we didn’t get checked on that trip, but still….

While in a German-style bar/restaurant for lunch, I could read the menu well enough to order the farmer’s salad as I just didn’t think the sausage/potato/sauerkraut choices were quite light enough for a midday meal. Well, I read the menu right, but this must have been a potato farmer, because the salad very much resembled German potato salad. Oh well, not the first or last time I make an ordering error in a foreign country.

And then there was the bread spread we encountered in a couple of restaurants. Often we find herbed butters or the occasional olive butter (eewwww, I think olives, all olives, are yucky—though I use olive oil all the time), but we couldn’t quite identify this new one. I didn’t like it much, and neither did Jim, though it wasn’t horrible, just not tasty. Ah, pork lard. There you go.

When you buy 3- or 4- or 5-day passes for the public transportation system, you get several choices, including which zones you will be traveling in and whether you want a tourist pass called the Welcome Card that gives you discounts at some of the tourist attractions. So, I bought a Welcome Card at one of the machines in the S-Bahn station and used it at the Botanical Gardens. Well, TRIED to use it. Despite a severe lack of a common language, the lady at the ticket booth at the Gardens let me know that despite the fact that I was holding a validated(!) Welcome Card pass, I needed to also have with me the Welcome Card booklet that you can only pick up at special ticket stations throughout the city. I, of course, had not done that and frankly never saw a place where we could have picked one up. So, another good idea gone awry.

Gemäldegalerie

This art museum is pretty much the perfect “Linda” museum. It has a truly wonderful collection but it’s possible to see it all in a day, especially if you kind of breeze through the church art. Unlike the way most museums get their collections, the paintings in this museum were chosen by specialists beginning in the 1800s with the objective of ensuring that all major schools of European art were represented. So it’s a great art history field trip, all in one place. And, as a sort of bonus, the Gemäldegalerie is attached to the Kunstgewerbemuseum (the Arts and Crafts Museum). This is also a very interesting museum, but I’m pretty much a one-museum-a-day kind of girl, so we went pretty quickly through this one (not to mention it was near closing time).

Potsdam

So, raise your hand if you knew that Potsdam was just outside Berlin. Uh-huh. Not very many of you, eh? Not me either. But of course Jim had discovered this as he was reading tour books and he had the usual Jim-obsession to see the place where the Potsdam Conference in 1945 was held. So, naturally, we went to Schloss Cecelienhof in the Neuer Garten in Potsdam. Until February of 1945, this was the Hohenzollern family residence after the Hohenzollerns were no longer in charge. It is now a hotel and restaurant, but they’ve made the rooms that were used as meeting spaces during the Conference into a museum. And, while the Berlin Wall was up, you couldn’t see the lovely lake that bordered the western edge of the property because the Wall was in the way. (This is the kind of thing that happened to us all the time while in Berlin—we would see something, or read something that would be a vivid reminder of either Nazi or Soviet evil-doings.)

It has taken about up till now for Jim to stop actively reacting to what we learned while we were there and then from our Hungarian friend whom we talked to a few days later. As you may recall, Potsdam was the last of a series of conferences held among Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Potsdam occurred 9 weeks after VE Day but before the conflict with Japan ended. Attendees at Potsdam were Stalin, Truman (Roosevelt had died), and Churchill briefly, then replaced by Attlee (whose party had just won the election that was finalized 10 days into the Potsdam Conference). Consequently, the only leader who had attended the previous conferences was Stalin. This was significant because agreements that were made at Potsdam did not reflect previous agreements made at prior conferences. And, worse still, according to our Hungarian friend (who has a friend who has been researching the newly released KGB files of the Soviet Union), all the meeting spaces at Cecelienhof were bugged by the Soviets, so they knew prior to the official meetings what the Brits and Americans would be proposing. (As noted, Cecelienhof was located in the Soviet-controlled sector soon to be known as East Germany.)

Anyway, this was a very interesting stop for us and highly recommended for anyone who has enough tourist time in Berlin to fit it in.

Potsdam also is the home of Park Sanssouci (without cares), a LARGE park that includes gardens and at least 10 different, significant buildings. (I should point out here that both this “park” and the Neuer Garten are mostly what we would call wooded areas—they were not landscaped in any way. Close to the schlosses (palaces) there were formal gardens.)

We toured the interiors of Schloss Sanssouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great (built in 1747), the Chinesisches Teehaus (Chinese Teahouse) whose exterior featured MANY dazzling, gold-leaf covered, full-size figures, the Bildergalerie (a museum completed in 1764 to display the King’s art collection) and did a lot of walking through the Park, passing fountains, gazebos, a Roman bath, and statuary.

We also walked around quite a bit of the rest of Potsdam and we can assure you that this is a prosperous suburb. We don’t know who lives there, but we know we couldn’t afford it!

So, all in all it was a lovely trip and I would certainly go back again. Berlin is a great European city!