Sorry for the break in programming here at Rose-coloured—the Sampsenblums went to Berlin! I haven’t travelled anywhere other than Charlottetown for more than a day or two in three years, so this was an even bigger deal than when we first conceived of the trip, I think about 7 years ago. A lot got in the way—pandemic, job losses, general mayhem—but we finally did and it was pretty great, and will probably take a few posts to tell you about. So if you are not interested in travelogue, no worries if you want to skip these posts—or at least skip to the end for the light-hearted travel dialogues!

This was a big museum trip so here’s a few of the museums—we saw seven in eight days, because we are hard-core like that. We caught sight of an unexpected museum as we were wandering around towards the end of the trip and it sounded pretty good but we both used the term “museumed out.” This was all great but a lot.

The Alte Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof are two of the six museums that constitute the national art galleries of Germany. Unlike the Louvre, which is one giant overwhelming monster gallery that will destroy you if you try to see it in one day, each of the six lovely spots is a pleasant couple hours to truly enjoy. Of course, you have to pay admission each time and if we’d gone to all six it would have cost of fortune but I still thought it was a better system. Anyway, the Alte is 19th century art—which in Germany seems to have all been painted on a black background and in deep shadow. The amount of black-on-black detail was impressive but it was not exactly my thing. The image above was grimmer than most but they were mainly at least a bit grim. I found one room that was full of bright, clear, exciting images and I thought I must have found a period in German art I liked better but it turned out to be acquired art from French Impressionists. Oh well. Hamburger Bahnof was the museum for art since reunification and it had a lot of strange conceptual art, including some lovely feminist oil paintings in shades of grey, a stunning conceptual music exhibit that took me a good half hour to really work out but richly repaid the effort, and a tedious-to-me riff on Duchamp’s thing with the urinal. Both galleries are in stunning buildings and both had mean docents, but especially at HB. They both had cafes and gift shops I think but I wasn’t really paying attention.

The Stasimuseum was the most esoteric and, for Mark, probably the crown jewel of our explorations. We spent five hours here on Easter Sunday and could have stayed longer if we’d had the stamina. The Stasi was the East German secret police, who were obsessed with spying on and documenting their own citizens, for…vague reasons, mainly just to create a panoptical state of control. So they had voluminous secretive data on everyone, which, in the post-reunification years, has been made public. So…the Stasi Museum is a lot. Basically every exhibit is a secret document, with wall text explaining the documents, and sometimes some secret photographs thrown in. I was relieved when some of the German wasn’t translated, to give me a break. Still I read thousands of words and learned a TONNE; mainly I learned is that life in East Germany 1953 to 1989 was a nightmare, but in more detailed. There’s also an exhibit on how reunification came to be, which is not a story I knew. It was a hard, awkward process with disparate groups trying to collaborate, and there were photos of some of the meetings, which were very moving: some of those schlubby looking people looking dazedly at the camera changed the world. It made this schlubby-looking person want to do more activism!

The Spy Museum struck me as being somewhat geared towards children, which would not normally have been a big deal, except we were there during Easter Week, which seemed to be a kind of spring break in Germany, or at least children did not seem to be in school. Most of them appeared to be at the Spy Museum, actually—running and yelling and not appreciating the subtle tragedy of a government that spies on its own people. I reflected a lot on this question at the Spy Museum, and also how much East Germany could have achieved if they had not devoted all their finest minds to creating a tiny camera that could be concealed in a necktie and a tiny gun that could be concealed in a lipstick, all the train on a family that made the grievous mistake of having a cousin in France. There were a lot of exhibits on such gadgets, and on hard-to-detect poisons and an umbrella you could stab someone with. Never have such neat things been so sad.

Ok, I’m going to have to write more on museums in another post because I’m running out of space and I HAVE to say something about the German food, which I did not like. Partly it was that we planned poorly and didn’t know exactly where to go or what to eat, partly it was that I don’t eat much meat and German food is very meat-forward, a lot of it was very expensive by Canadian standards and thus extra-disappointing when it was not good, but partly it was just not my jam. I had thought it would be like England, where it was not an elevated cuisine landscape but you could always duck into a pub and have fish and chips or pub curry and it would be pretty good and you’d participating in the local fare. However, the local fare in Berlin is “currywurst” which is a sausage covered in a sauce made of ketchup mixed with curry powder and heated up, served with fries. If you are seated at a table, the sausage is whole, but if it’s served as street food they cut the sausage into little chunks so you can eat it with one of those little wooden forchettes you’d normally eat fries with at the fair. I like ketchup findeand curry powder in ketchup isn’t terrible, but I don’t see why it has to be hot, nor so voluminous. Some of the touristy areas stank of hot ketchup—the warmth really amplifies the smell. And yes, I did try a vegan version and no I learned nothing.

Anyway, once we realized we weren’t going to like any of the food, we started just getting the cheapest possible thing at the grocery store or fast food and eating it in the hotel or on park benches, which was fine except Mark is really too chaotic to do this. At one of the worst restaurants I’ve ever been to, a fast food abomination called Nord Sea, I had to stop him from ordering a herring sandwich. Mark, as a maritimer, wasn’t paying attention, and just assumes all fish is great and approximately equal. I, as a Jew (you will not catch me saying “as a Jew” a lot, but herring is unique) knows that herring is an edge-case fish and you either love it or you spend the rest of the day getting over it. Later, after Mark ordered a normal fish-stick sandwich and it blew away in the park square, causing him to chase after it and dump his Fanta on the ground, I noticed that our dipping sauces came in little wafer cups, like ice-cream cones.

Mark, in Droopy Dog voice: Yeah, yours is still edible. Mine’s been on the ground.

I gave Mark my wafer bowl with the dregs of Thai chili sauce to eat, which he did not like.

A different day, Mark offered me a bite of his soft pretzel, the only food we consistently enjoyed in Berlin.

RR: This is filled. You got a filled pretzel?
MS: Yes? Yes. On purpose.
RR: With what? What is this? Is it sweet? Or savoury?
MS: I definitely intentionally bought this pretzel filled with a vague substance.

Poor Mark was eventually banned from eating on the bed, which took up most of our hotel room, and yet somehow got chocolate on the sheets anyway. The best meal I had was spaetzle with emmentaler sauce, which is essentially fancy macaroni and cheese. This was on the way home, at the airport in Frankfort.

There will be a part two of the Berlin stories.