Yesterday was spent travelling from London to Berlin. The flight itself was not that long, but the airport business on both ends took quite a while. Once at passport control in Berlin, we were very aware that Turks were being given ‘special treatment’ in a bad way by the passport agents. Awful to watch and very time-consuming, as so many were on our flight. We, of course, sailed through. 

As a result, it was evening by the time we got to our hotel. We ate dinner here, and – I was delighted to learn – Wiener Schnitzel was featured on the menu. We even got to watch it being prepared. I hope to encounter it many more times, and am glad to report that this one measured up to most Austrian standards. Don’s salad? I’m sure it was delicious.

Don is off doing laundry, so I did some grocery shopping and scoped out the neighborhood around our hotel. Directly across from us is the Tempodrom, a concert and event venue. It stands on what was once (pre-war) a major train station, the Anhalter Bahnhof. All of what remains is the entrance, but it was originally the building shown in the photo.

We had lunch at an Italian restaurant near our hotel. Scallopine Milanese does not really begin to compare to schnitzel, but the potato and mushroom soup was excellent, and Don enjoyed his pizza with salami.

While Don is currently out doing additional errands to get us organized, I paid a brief visit to Potsdamer Platz, now a major shopping and entertainment area which was once bisected by the Berlin Wall. Today it’s an ode to consumerism, which is how these things seem to evolve…