Berlin!

We are now in Berlin, where it is still winter.   There is snow on the ground.   Dinner:  roast pork, cabbage, potatoes, beer.   We are not in Paris any more.

We last visited Berlin in 1997, in the summer time.  It is different in the winter; the openness and plentiful trees are not significant in the winter.  I am struck by how spread out Berlin is; even with all the construction since we were last here, there are plenty of seemingly abandoned lots and empty spaces.   It can take a long time, via walking or Ubahn, to get from one place to another.  Berlin is more like New York in some ways; a mosaic of a city, with pockets of old (and reconstructed) buildings in between blocks of dreary postwar constructions.  It's not a city for strolling in the same way Paris is.
But there is an extraordinary amount to see here, both of cultural and historic interest.  I remember our first visit, a few years after the Wall fell, when we took a bus that went from the west, through the Brandenburg Gate and the site of the Wall and into the older Eastern section, when all the images of history were suddenly real.  Seeing the empty space where Potsdamer Platz was, situated between the two Berlin's was a reminder of all the Berlin had been through;  now it is all rebuilt; and the empty space is mostly gone.  So I don't feel that same weight of history that I once felt.   But we have plenty to see; new museums, memorials, and even a brand new train station.