We got up after a good night’s sleep and after a simple breakfast worked on our computers for just a little bit before we set out for a day of lots of walking (about 11 miles total today). We started by walking through the nearby Volkspark Friedrichshain, just to explore this invitingly large green space, and it made us realize how extensive the damage caused by a few minutes of violent wind last night really was. Several big tree branches and a couple of entire mature trees were downed. Apparently quite a bit of damage also occurred in the countryside around Berlin, and a couple of people were severely injured by falling trees. Wow.
We also made an interesting discovery about a hill at the center of the park which is called “Bunker Hillock” because underneath the lovely paths among trees and meadows lies (as one would surmise from the name) a big WWII bunker and also a huge amount of debris from around the area that was carted here after World War II, which destroyed so much of Berlin. But from the documentation we found along our path, we could see that it was in type and dimensions the same kind of bunker as that enormous thing at the Feldstrasse in Hamburg that now has its “new hat” and that we climbed up the other day–except this one was blown up by the Soviets after the war and then buried to create a 78 meter (240 feet) hill in a park.
From the park, we walked to the nearest tram station and took the tram and then the subway to see our friend Sophie, who is currently a doctoral student here in Berlin, but who had spend five months in Lincoln on a research project last fall. She showed us her apartment and we got to meet her dog, Karlsson, who was very excited that we took him for a walk after having lunch and coffee at her favorite neighborhood cafe. We walked all over her “Kiez” and her larger neighborhood, Berlin-Wedding. She has lived here for almost 10 years (for the past five or so in a lovely older apartment building, in a small flat with a combined living/bedroom but with a separate kitchen. She showed us where she usually walks, what places she likes, etc. It was a lot of fun, because we got a real sense of the neighborhood, which was mostly built between 1900-1920 for the enormous influx of workers into the city, where industrialization really did not take hold until late in the 19th century, and which saw its main growth after 1900. We took some photos of our favorite spots but mostly just walked and talked.
We left Sophie’s about 4 pm, grabbed some groceries after we got home, and had salad, rolls, and cheese for dinner here, taking advantage of the fully functional kitchen. Then we went back out because we would have otherwise just fallen asleep, just two stops by subway because our legs were very tired, and found an okay-ish place that sold ice cream by the scoop in a simple waffle cone near the Alexanderplatz, where there was good people watching. We even saw the sun come out for about five minutes, but when it wandered off again and hid behind the clouds like it had most of the day, we decided to wander off as well and take our subway train back home. We were back around 7:30 and will take it easy for the rest of the night.
