Wednesday 31 May
Deutsche Bahn arrives from Freiburg, on time amazingly since 70% of their trains have been late in 2023 so far. We disembark at Südkreuz, the main southern terminus station for Berlin long distance trains. Cass is on conference calls so the boys and I jump on the bus over to our home exchange flat on Wiesbadener Str, ecke Laubacher Str. This is the Rudisheimer Platz kiez in Friedenau, a place we'd never spent too much time, but which was quite close to our previous center of operations in Wilmersdorf. Friedenau's most famous resident is Marlene Dietrich, lying in peace in the Friedenau Friedhof just off the Sudwest Korso.
One attractive aspect of these return trips to Berlin is that we end up with a chance to spend time in a slightly off-track neighborhood outside the swirl of the typical life we had here. Meet Lisa and Kevin out at Lulu am Market, a popular restaurant on the main platz in Friedenau in front of the historic municipal building and library for a sunny patio Hefeweizen and Burger. Friedenau was too far south of the downtown areas to see much war damage, so lots of the old buildings and neighborhood feel are still intact here. The area is full of stately trees and lots of shade up and down the avenues lined with Altbau (pre-war) buildings.
"Working Remotely". Get up and take the kids up to the Volkspark to go meet Kevin and other Wangaari Mathai kids at the Wilmersdorfer Stadium for sport day. I walk a big loop back through Wilmersdorf and Bayerischer Platz, where we stayed in the AirBnB on Westarpstrasse our first three weeks in the city in 2015.
I stop at R3, one of the cafes that fronts Rudisheimer Platz, for that delicious first sip of a cappuccino in Berlin when you've been away for awhile.
Later on I meet Jani up at Rebel Room Burger on Seestrasse near where he lives in Wedding. We then proceed down to the Vagabund Brewery which recently moved into the former Osram lightbulb factory. Vast factory space, lots of brick, with Vagabund established in one of the buildings. Biergarten outside under a faux camouflage netting cover and strung with lights. The tap options are scrawled on one of the old huge metal factory doors, standing open on rusted hinges. It is a former industrial yard, so lots of dirty brick facades, decommissioned smoke stacks, and assorted junk lies about that they haven't yet cleaned up, but it is Berlin, so somehow it still feels cool.
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| Osram factory yard and Vagabund Brewery |
Jani's days in Berlin are closing down: his Canadian girlfriend was offered an art curator position in the small town of Grand Prairie, Alberta and they are moving there in July. Jani was one of the first organic friends I had made in Berlin, and we had gone on countless early morning rides and bike Fondos over the years. I walk down Müllerstr afterwards. It is still Wedding, still slightly sketchy, lots of huddling guys in corners in the parks and behind buildings. But lots of life on the main streets with the sidewalk tables and the foot traffic. Energie of the big city. Cass and kids meet Jen and Dan, Wiebke and Tino out at Platzhirsch for the night.
Friday 02 June
"More Working Remotely." Cass and I go up to Lisa's to borrow her and Kevin's bikes for the weekend. I have a light morning so I go out to Rudisheimer's other side and check out the cafe over there. That afternoon I wander through the Akazienkiez, our first Berlin neighborhood, where within a couple block radius you have the flat where David Bowie lived with Iggy Pop between 1976-78, our kid's preschool, and the vast Amtsgericht building where the guys who tried to kill Hitler were sentenced. I meet Christian up on Potsdamer Strasse to check out the Black Hole Berlin art installation. We drink späti bier in the scrubby park at Lützowstrasse beforehand. We do the night all in German for a change as I am supposed to get more practice. We get a sidewalk table at a Vietnamese restaurant on a side street off Potsdamer Strasse for dinner.
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| Black Hole Berlin at P61. Computer-generated visuals exhibit. |
Afterwards I walk up to Potsdamer Platz, the Gate, The Reichstag, across the Spree on Reinhardtstrasse (where a former S-Bahn bridge support has received a new brick wall facing, covering up a mosaic of crazy WWII battle damage unfortunately) and finally to Friederichstrasse. Restaurants fronting the water have the tables out and lights blinking and reflecting off the river. Nearby, a couple hundred people are gathered and doing salsa along the river across from the Congress hall. Cass is dropping off the kids with Rumi and Alex (Leon, Clara and Lukas) after dinner with them in Charlottenburg. Kids will stay up there tonight in Tegel. I walk back home from Zoologischer Garten, mostly down Uhlandstrasse. Max and Mortiz', local institution, is closed and getting torn down for a new business.
Saturday 03 June
We have a kid-free day. Get up late, go to yoga in the Akazienhof, coffee at Double Eye. Yoga was busy: there were nearly 70 people in that studio, which just opened last year. The fact that such high demand exists for this is crazy: our old studio is located in the same Hof and is still going strong. We sit on a store window recess, which functions well as a bench, next to Double Eye and watch the sunny Schöneberg sidewalk traffic roll by, always one of my favorite past-times.
We take the bikes and head over to Tempelhofer Feld, taking the southern route up by Sudgelände. We get a little lost and end up skirting the southern part of the old airport on the wrong side of the highway and finally enter on the Neukölln side, bottom end of the Schillerkiez. The place is crazy busy, lots more people out than I have ever seen there before. Emblematic of Berlin's growth probably. The Luftgarten is closed for renovations, so no cool drinks for us, until we spot a small kiosk selling Club Mate and fruit juice. We also get a Magnum ice cream treat for good measure.
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| Main Runway at Tempelhof |
Later on I meet Bartlett at Platzhirsch and we drink our Hefes under the garten lights and the oak trees with the Hirschbrünnen splashing in the background distance. I've known Chris since 1994 working for the ski tours wholesaler in Boulder, CO. He relocated back here in 2019 (grew up in West Berlin). A demo is happening in the Volkspark: Berlin's sex workers are staging a parade and campaigning for rights. As it winds down, strangely-dressed prostitutes of all genders and profiles filter by us in groups.
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| Bartlett at Platzhirsch |
Alex drives the kids down to Schöneberg from their overnighter up in Tegel and drops them off right at the Rathaus as Chris leaves. The boys and I head over to the "Landhaus" (formerly Tomasa on Salzburger Str, site of many a brunch when we lived on Babelsberger) to meet Cass and her girlfriends having their girls night out. After some dessert they too are winding down so we say goodbye to all and go back south on the U9 to Friederich Wilhelm Platz before heading back over to the flat on Wiesbadener/Laubacher Str.
Sunday 04 June
Cass does an early walk with Wiebke, I go out for Franzbrötchen and croissants. Later on there is a moment before I do a run, so I cruise the Schöneberg Rathaus (of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" fame) Flohmarkt. It is always amazing the piles of crap that people will put out on tables and that other people will spend hours pawing through. Really amazing. I'm always looking for old enamelled metal signs, DDR relics or weathered boxes that had some interesting purpose in another life. So maybe it is not so amazing.
We head over to BRLO at 13:00. End up staying until 20:00 that night as a rotation of school, work, and other friends comes by to say hi and have a drink. Kids play at Gleisdreieck with their buds as usual.
Lingering goodbyes as we leave tomorrow morning for London.
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| Tim, an old Razorfish work buddy, and Cass on the BRLO deck |
The four of us head back to Yorktown UBahn stop, walking down through the Gleisdreieck summer scene. Kids picking out the American Church we used to go to. Yorktown Ubahn has been massively upgraded. Kids noting lots of other things as we walk around: what we did in that Spielplatz, how someone changed that building, what happened to that old restaurant. Earlier in the week we had gone by WM school on Babelsberger to meet Liam, one of Cody's friends, for a play date in the Volkspark. We saw a few other parents and kids that we still know from that time.
I'm eating up the experience of simply walking around our old haunts, the four of us. Someday, probably soon, the kids will envision better things to do with their Berlin visits than walk about with their parents. But for now we can straddle this gap between our time there and our new life in Freiburg with Tweeners.
"Why did you leave America?" people have always asked. The easy answer was: "To have an adventure." Whether Seattle, Berlin or Topeka, we would have envisioned our life as an adventure no matter where we did it, the whole experience of bringing up young kids is an adventure in itself. But jumping off this particular cliff in 2015 has always felt more like a movie, which is how I still feel walking around Berlin's avenues, the four of us together.
Monday 05 June
Cass and I arise early to return the bikes to Lisa. Street hugs on Paretzer Str, then we walk back down to Wiesbadener through yet another cool morning, sunlight dappling on the Altbau facades and people lined up at the bakeries. We stop at Czerr for a coffee and croissant on their outside terrace. From there it is endless convincing and conniving of our beautiful tweeners to help pack and clean up the home exchange place so we can meet the taxi at 10:30 for the trip to BER and the flight to London.
We are immediately south of town on the Autobahn, not the usual direction we'd take so there is nothing familiar to look at. Except for the wide expanse of Tempelhof, which the highway skirts.
I can't look at it without replaying historical videos of the C-47s and C-54s lumbering in over Neukölln during the Airlift, or watching Cody & Jasper playing on top of old rusted metal lattices that were used to build those runways, or the training rides when I was shooting down the main runway on my Motobecane in the mornings on my way into work in Friederichshain, or flying kites on the old taxiways with the kids...
This is now my reality of Berlin: lots of history. The expat magazine "Exberliner" ran a best-of edition that I picked up during our first return visit to the city last year. It had some really choice pieces chronicling other people's experiences of moving here. And how you quickly get caught up in the essential bitter- sweet aspect of expat life: in the excitement and adrenaline of a new place you will miss a now-growing list of old places, places that for some reason you decided to leave, so you only have yourself to blame for the whole thing. You start to expect the excitement of a new adventure, but as soon as you jump you can't believe what you just left behind.
The quote I remember was taken from Giovanni's Room:
"You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."
So with those thoughts in mind, here's a then and now pic of the kids on the U4 platform...
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| The kids, summer 2015 |
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| And summer 2023.. |
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