Malta for Herbstferien

Valletta's Old Town streets, Malta

October Herbstferien (Fall) break: we've used this in the past to go to:

• Geneva/Lyon (2016): Met up with Seattle friends Jason & Ashley to stay in an ancient guesthouse on the side of the mountain in Lyon, hiked around an 1800's French army based drilled into a mountain in Grenoble, played at cafes on the shore of Lake Geneva and explored Georg's hometown of Basel when he and Kath were in Switzerland for a year.

• Croatia/Bosnia (2017), Hiked the trails of Plitvice Lakes and gaped at Diocletian's palace and spectacular harbor sunsets from our flat's balcony in Split. In the former UN enclave of Bihac in northwest Bosnia, we adopted three dogs for an autumn dayhike in a quiet mountain reserve, while back in town the kids learned what civil wars leave by sticking their fingers into recent bullet holes in the town's buildings. 

• Pyrenees/Basque Country (2018), Hiked from a Refugio on the French Pyrenees border, stayed with Pam & Hank in a 14th century farmhouse owned by Seattle acquaintances outside Besalu, explored Catalan separatist towns, drank local vermouth at Hemingway's Cafe Iruña in Pamplona, hiked around the Peace Park in Guernica and finally threw ourselves at art at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. 

So the Herbstferien trips have been pretty legendary. This year we went to Malta before meeting up with some friends in Rome. Here's what we learned about Malta.

Valletta view from the Sliema neighborhood where we stayed.

Malta's geographic location, like other Mediterranean islands we've visited of Cyprus and Sardinia, ensures a lengthy historical record of alternating cultures settling and fighting over the place. Originally settled in the Iron Age by peoples sailing south from Sicily, the island's position in the middle of the Med's ancient trade routes compelled successive waves of Phoenicians, Carthiginians, Normans, Romans, Arabs and finally Christians to visit. 

In 1565 The Ottoman Turks were the last major force to attempt to invade and conquer Malta, prompting a famous defense of the island by the Knights of St. John that pitted 8000 knights and locals against a force of 40-50K Turks. After a four month siege the Turks were repelled and Christian people celebrated the efforts of the Knights from stopping what was viewed as the precursor to a Turkish/Islam invasion of Europe.

Throughout the 1600's fort-building was a gigantic industry on the island as money flowed south from grateful European monarchs expecting the Turks to try again. As a result the capital Valletta and the shorelines and harbors nearby are lined with vast walls and fort structures. The Turks were never a threat after their 1565 defeat, but the building continued. After a two year incursion by Napoleon, the British took over the island in 1800 and began building their own forts and batteries on the coastlines alongside the Medieval structures. In World War I Malta functioned as a main British supply base for the invasion of the Dardenelles Peninsula (Turkey).

The next significant threat to Malta occurred in World War II, when again its location pushed it into the crosshairs of expanding empires. Italy had invaded northern Africa in the late 1930's, but got into trouble when they had to start fighting the British in Egypt. The Germans moved to support them by sending the Afrika Korps to Libya in 1940. In order to supply these armies, the Axis had to send a steady lifeline of cargo ships from Italy across the Mediterranean. Much of this went right by Malta, which as a British base constantly harassed them with air, surface ship and submarine attacks.

So the Italians started bombing Malta. And then the Germans joined in. From June 1940 until November 1942 Malta was bombed extensively by both Axis air forces and defended at high cost  in men and material by the RAF and Royal Navy. Tunnels that had been dug centuries earlier to provide escape routes for Valletta's defenders now were turned into an underground headquarters for the British forces. The British orchestrated the defence of the island from the so-called Lascaris War Rooms deep underneath Valletta's city streets, impervious to the rain of Axis bombs above.

The end of the aerial "siege" came in late 1942 when the Germans lost the 2nd Battle of El Alamein and had to divert all resources to Tunisia to fight the Americans, who had just landed in French Morocco and were making their way east. By then it was curtains for the Afrika Korps and Malta emerged as one of the key reasons for the Allied success.

Just a few months later, Malta again played a key role in the war as its underground HQ hosted all the Allied leadership which ran the invasion of Sicily from there.

So, as is always the case, we pick places with lots of interesting backstory! We arrived on Sunday and spent the afternoon checking out Sliema and walking around the peninsula across the bay from Valletta. 

View from our AirBnB apartment: Cambridge Battery.

The balcony in the flat we rented looked over the former Cambridge Battery, a Victorian-era British gun emplacement. Built between 1878-86, it held the formidable Armstrong Gun, a 100-ton cannon that fired a 450mm shell up to 7000 yards. It was built in response to the discovery that the Italian Navy had launched a couple armoured cruisers that each held four of these guns. The British wanted to help safeguard the vital trade route between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, which had just opened in 1869, and wanted Malta's artillery to ensure this.

The gun at Cambridge Battery was never fired in a war setting. Its ammunition was quite expensive: a single shell cost as much as a singe day's wage for 2600 sailors. So it was only fired for practice purposes once every three months. The battery was shut down in 1906 and the gun scrapped in the 1950's under a program to clean up Malta's outdated ordnance. In the 1970' a hotel was built on part of the battery, then torn down and a gigantic complex was constructed next to it with the promise that the battery would be restored and turned into a tourist stop on a planned "Heritage Route" around the island. It was obvious recent work had been done but there was no activity while we were there.

Inspecting the beach rocks next to Fort Tigne on the tip of the Sliema peninsula.

Cassandra with Valletta in back.

Cody and the sea.

On our second day we wanted to take a ferry up to the sister island of Gozo to the north of Malta, but inclement weather shut down the ferries. We took local busses up to Burgibba to find a sandy beach but after extensive walking about only experienced rock shelves next to furiously-pounding surf. We jumped another bus out to "Golden Beach" (promising) but just after arriving the dark skies opened up and deluged us for an hour. Luckily we got a seat at the only resaurant and had lunch while the rain came down.

Day 2 (Monday): Looking for a sandy beach situation in Burgibba under a threatening sky.

Presently the rain let up a bit and the kids went swimming. Then it started sprinkling again but they're kids in the surf and they don't care. 

On the verge of getting wet.

We sat in this little beach bar and drink tea and Irish Coffee while the kids were out in the surf. We could see them. Mostly.

"The Malta Experience" audio-visual show includes a tour of the Knights of St John's 1580s-era hospital, built into the walls of Medieval Malta's extensive fortifications. Here is the entryway (probably updated).

The main ward of the Knight's hospital. Apparently the largest in Europe when built.

On top, we have the 12 noon saluting battery, a hold over from the British days.

Day 3: Valletta's Old Town. Republikka Street. Working British phone boxes still can be spotted around.

Malta is a bit of a mix of the British sense of order (see above sign) and an Eastern, 3rd-world feeling when you look into certain alleyways littered with trash and construction equipment.

Lascaris War Rooms situation map. Here they tracked the waves of incoming bombers from Sicily.

Interp guy in Royal Navy khakis lays out the strategic situation of Malta and Sicily in WWII.

Directly across from the huge wall map, Eisenhower and Montgomery sat in these chairs and ran the invasion of Sicily.

Underground HQ's always have fun staircases to run around!

Entrance to the tunnels. Yes it was quite protected from the bombs.

City park in Valletta still bears scars from bombing in WWII.

With old walls this scenic, you have to strike heroic poses in front of them!

Valletta's balconies.

After thoroughly checking out Valletta, we took the harbor ferry over to Senglea/Birgu for dinner. Rainstorm once again foiled a pleasant streetside dinner with a view as we'd hoped to get. Ah well!

Jay went scuba diving on a reef and an old shipwreck. It was a German Minesweeper that was sunk just north of the Gozo ferry terminal for the purpose of divesite creation.

Tons of divers up here. You just wade into the water, get your mask set, and drop off that shelf into the blue. Really cool.

And then we left Malta the next morning, quite early, to go check out Rome.

Playground fun

Zip lines still consistently bring smiles!

Barefoot at Beelitz Heilstätten

Beelitz Heilstätten Barefoot Park

Beelitz Heilstätten ("Healing-Place") is a collection of overgrown buildings in the pine forests outside Berlin that used to be the country's pre-eminent Tuberculosis treatment clinic. A visit down here drops you into a unique example of how Germany packages up its history for family-friendly commerce.

Over the ruins of war-damaged Sanatorium buildings, investors paid to build a canopy walkway 20 meters high that gives visitors a drone's-eye view of the old hospital buildings. A 35 meter platform anchors one end of the walkway, which gives you a view over the sea of pine trees, punctuated here and there by red brick cupola towers. 

A few of the old buildings have been renovated for safety and turned into cafes and exhibit halls. For 10 Euro you can join a tour that takes you inside a couple of them to hear and see the history. Cafes and kid playgrounds are easy to find, along with food trucks offering BBQ and ice cream. Additional money was put into creating a family-focused "barefoot park," hiking trail loops through the nearby forest designed to provide walking surfaces that stimulate sensations for your feet (smooth stones, pine cones, or long boxes of gray mush that feels vaguely like cement). 

Visitors stream by fenced off derelict hospital buildings. There are plenty of visitors, since the stop is a quick train ride down from Berlin and there is a lot of marketing. The wide avenues impart an amusement park feeling, but it doesn't quite fit since the apparent attractions are crumbling ruins instead of roller coasters and ferris wheels. But we're not here for the familiar things, we're here for the weird stuff, and this one is definitely that.

I biked down from the city with my bud Jani that morning (55km, a couple hours) and met Cass and kids who took the regional train. We got some pulled pork sandwiches at a BBQ cooker stand (the cook was Australian, the cooker itself was a metal drum built to appear like a miniature steam engine). He'd bought it in Poland from a guy who enjoys making such things. After this we proceeded up the tower to the canopy walk.

At first you don't see very much, then suddenly old attics appear between the trees.

This building was the women's hospital. War damage left it a ruin since 1945. Now the trees and shrubs taking root in the old attics actually keep the walls together. This will prolong the life of the old structures.

Here you can see the degree of nature's progress. Metal structure in back is the frame of the building's former tower, which burned at war's end.

Canopy walkway takes you right through the attic trees. The staff's living quarters were in these attics, so you look down into their old rooms.

Top of the tower. The tips of the old buildings sticking up out of the tree cover reminded me of the Mayan pyramids in Tikal, which transmit a similar feel.

Down from the walkway, we then entered the Barfuss Park, dutifully removed our shoes, and starting our trek around the forest treading on lots of strange substances.

MUD!

CEMENT - GET OUT QUICK

Post hike, you enter a well-provisioned clean up area with benches, water nozzles and brushes.

All of this family fun occurs against a backdrop of interesting history, which of course I will shamelessly dive into now.

Why are these buildings here?

Germany industrialized a bit later than England, not gaining its momentum until the 1880's and 1890's. In 1871, Berlin counted about 800K people, but by 1900 it hit 2.0M. Jobs in the growing economy pulled in people from everywhere,  helping to build Berlin's early reputation as a melting pot. 

The jobs however were not pleasant, with people working 60 hours a week and getting paid just enough to survive. Many had spent their last savings to get here and had to accept pathetically bad living situations in order to stay. Indoor plumbing was for the bourgeois, so everyone else had to deal with interior courtyard latrines that sometimes served up to 40 or 50 people, making sanitation and hygiene quite difficult.

With everyone moving to the city to work in the factories, gigantic new housing blocks needed to be built to accommodate them. As the buildings went up, people moved right in, even though the plaster that covered the interior walls had not had time to dry. It was called "wet renting"- the walls needed about six months after construction to properly cure and dry out before a paying tenant should move in. But since lots of desperate new arrivals needed housing immediately, landlords saw an opportunity and so agreed to let people move in for half the rate a normal tenant would pay. Six months later when the walls had properly cured up, they'd rent it to people who could pay market rates. The first group would move on to find another "wet" flat.

Predictably, the "wet" flat was not a healthy place due the humid conditions and resulting mold. Families frequently were huge and it was quite typical for a family of 8 or more people to live in a two bedroom flat. Clearly there was no privacy, but even worse were the health conditions since germs spread quickly. In these settings, Tuberculosis, a highly-contagious disease spread mostly by airborne exposure through coughing, sneezing or spitting, grew over time to epidemic proportions.

Germany at this time had a universal health insurance system (of course they did). But after a few years of the TB epidemic, the system began to falter. They were losing so many people to TB that it was starting to threaten the system's viability: pay-outs would fall with the dearth of healthy workers paying into it. Many of the victims were men, and while there were always more moving in from the countryside and neighbouring lands, the epidemic was beginning to adversely affect the entire industrial economy. Government advisors also warned that if this level of young men kept dying off or being invalided, soon the Imperial Army would face a severe manpower shortage.

There was no antibiotic yet for TB, but getting out of the city to enjoy fresh air, exercise and good food did help cure people. Sanatoriums existed on Germany's Baltic Sea coast and in the mountains in Bavaria in the South. But these places were beyond the reach of Berlin's cash-strapped industrial workers. "How do we save these people with no means?" became the prime public health policy question of the day. Foundations were being laid that continue to influence and drive the country's approach to health coverage today.

A decision was taken to build sanatoriums close in to the city of Berlin specifically for the poor workers. Beelitz was ideal since it already had a rail station, and it was situated in a sea of pine trees just southwest of the city. Another advantage was that the prevailing air currents went West to East, so the city's pollution would never course over Beelitz. 

Beelitz was the largest sanatorium complex built. You had to have an insurance policy to get here, which meant that you needed to have a job and been paying into the system. As long as that was true, you had a chance to come to Beelitz for treatment. So down they came, and once they arrived they immediately saw that life was going to be much different than the dim and damp tenement blocks of Berlin.

The national health insurance company had spent extra money on Beelitz's buildings, furnishings, and facilities to avoid having to spend additional funds in a couple years when cheaper components and equipment would normally start wearing out. The Villeroy & Bosch porcelain tiles in the water therapy rooms were triple-fired to prevent porous surfaces where germs could hide. To the degree possible, corners of showers, kitchens and patient rooms were rounded to aid in cleaning and denying dust a place to collect. Dining hall kitchens were all fitted with modern dishwashers, which could clean the plates with much hotter water than would be possible with hand washing, and also insulated staff from handling TB-infected food and cutlery. 

The grounds and buildings were designed to look like an English country garden, with spires on cupolas and long winding paths around the extensive 200 hectare real estate. All the food was grown locally. Beelitz had its own milk cow herd, which was fed a special diet so they would produce extra high fat-content milk.

All patients had to put on weight, since many arrived malnourished and enfeebled as a result of very thin diets they survived on in the city. Adding weight was one of the determinants of returning to health and being able to fight off the disease, so the priority was on getting people fed hearty and healthy meals. In large dining halls minders stood on balconies to ensure that every guest finished their meals. Why would this be a problem? Some people decided that the longer they took to gain weight, the longer they could extend their stay at Beelitz. Nurses put a quick stop this sort of behaviour.

Patients were encouraged to spend time outside, even during the winter months. Getting fresh air was a priority aspect of the treatments, so people were just loaded down with coats and muffs and sent out, each averaging six hours a day outside in the fresh air. Bed-ridden TB patients stayed in rooms with large covered exterior balconies so they could be wheeled outside under their blankets.

Part of the treatment here was educating everyone on the importance of cleanliness. All visitors were presented with a toothbrush, a thermometer, and a large glass spittoon with a metal top enclosure. A symptom of the disease was coughing and spitting, so everyone learned to spit ONLY in their spittoons. Anyone caught spitting on the floor would not only be immediately sent back to Berlin, but would be ejected from the National Health System. The floors in Beelitz would stay super clean and the nursing staff would be protected! 

By driving these lessons home to people, they were able to take this back with them when they recovered. While no back house in Moabit was going to approximate Beelitz, people at least knew what was making them sick and could work to ease those conditions.

The decades passed at Beelitz. A young Adolf Hitler stayed here to get treatment for wounds received during his service in the army in WWI. The Kaiser abdicated. The Weimar Republic stood on wobbly legs for a time, then came crashing down as the National Socialists tightened their grip on power in the mid 1930's. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Beelitz began its journey away from TB clinic to all-out military hospital. As Germany's fortunes faded, Beelitz took on more and more wounded from battles against the Russians.

At the end, with the Russians surrounding Berlin, the hospital was packed with about 3000 wounded soldiers. Remaining German formations, mostly Busse's 9th Army, was in the process of pushing westward through the Russian cordon South of the city to link up with another isolated German formation, Walther Wenck's 12th Army. They ignored a direct order from Hitler to attack northward towards Berlin to relieve the city, an order that would have spelled thousands of more needless deaths. 

The Russians were in the area and an attack from the 12th Army pushed them temporarily away from Beelitz. The Germans had just one day to empty out Beelitz's 3000 patients to save them from Russian captivity, which they somehow managed. The next day the Russians took Beelitz over for good. During the battle, the women's hospital (the Alpenhaus) roof caught fire and burned out. The huge building was left as a war ruin. 

The Russians soon turned Beelitz into the largest Soviet military hospital outside of the USSR. They did not invest much in the property, so the wear and tear were significant by the time of their departure in 1994.

A private owner purchased the land from the state and tried to turn it into a "forest retreat" community, but this idea faltered and the idea bankrupted the initiative by 2002. Between 2003 and 2008 the grounds were left open as convoys of flea market collectors, souvenir hunters and scrap dealers cleaned the place out of the valuable stuff that the Russians didn't take. In 2009 another investor group bought it, secured it, and started building the canopy walkway, barefoot park and various restorations. The area has "Denkmalschutz" (listed building protection) so there is only so much they can do with the structures, but for now it seems to be on its way to historical preservation.

Certain people will always be interested in ruined buildings with deep history, so the place is an asset of sorts. And kids will always love slogging through mud puddles, so the near future seems assured for Beelitz. For now.

Here are the pics:

Main corridor of the women's TB hospital. It was referred to as the "Alpenhaus" due to its proximity to a line of small hills created from excavations of the original facility construction.

Individual patient rooms with twisted old bed frames and side tables. The Russians removed the walls separating the original rooms to use the bricks on construction projects in other parts of the complex.

Main women's dining hall, Alpenhaus. Steel framing in the ceiling helped keep the buildings intact after the roof burned out.

Russian graffiti still decorates many corners of those rooms. This is in the water therapy facility.

Not the original curtains, but still giving off a nice ghostly effect.

This was the next-door building the the Alpenhaus, but was not open for explorations.

  

The main door of the Alpenhaus.

Bomb shelters were built in the central courtyards to protect patients and staff from Allied air attacks. This one you can still go inside.

Four rooms turned into one by Soviet redecorating.

/ BEELITZ

Father's Day at the Wall/Unterwelten

One bit I forgot to add in about recent Father's Day was Cassandra's gift to me: a ticket for us all to go to the Berliner Unterwelten Lange Nacht der Unterwelten.

What does all that mean? "Unterwelten" is a local association that runs archeological projects that delve into Berlin's subterranean history. (Unterwelten means "under worlds.") This includes stuff like abandoned U-Bahn tunnels, underground bunkers, dis-used brewery cellar vaults and escape routes under the former Berlin Wall.

On the Lange Nacht ticket we gained admittance to as many of these things as we wanted to see in between 6pm and 2 am on a recent Friday night. It was as close to the perfect gift for me as anyone could possibly imagine and so the night arrived and we all went with Poppy to the first spot.

The civilian air raid bunker underneath the Gesundbrunnen train station.

Built by the Nazis to guard Berliners from Allied air strikes, the bunker was used as a supplies cache during the Cold War in case the Russians cut off Berlin again. Afterwards "Unterwelten" was permitted by the city to start doing research and now it is a large underground museum that traces the history of Berlin's wartime experience through the Cold War by exhibiting its collection in the former air raid shelter rooms.

The old paint is still on the walls directing people to the bathrooms, old ventilation blowers sit rusted in corners and in glassed exhibit boxes are bent MG-34 machine guns, pottery shards and shoes unearthed from the city's war rubble. To clean the city of the bomb and battle debris, they built a network of narrow-gauge rail lines for trains to take the mountains of bricks out of the city for deposit in various locations.  Many of these rubble mountains on the city's outskirts now form Berlin's only real terrain features.

From the bunker we moved on to a video exhibit set up in the former men's restroom in an underground S-Bahn station. The facility hasn't been updated and our chairs were placed right next to the tiled pisser-wall and floor drain. As we say constantly around here when having these experiences, "Okay, that was so Berlin." The video was 1930's era footage of the incredible work involved in drilling and supporting train tunnels for the U-Bahn underneath the city. The size and scope of these huge concrete projects that were executed in vast underground caverns beneath a functioning city was startling. Even a slice of double-deck train tunnels required incredible amounts of concrete, and these things extended for miles underneath the city.

The third stop was at Bernauer Strasse. This is the location of the Berlin Wall Memorial, complete with a long section of the still-standing barrier. This is the place of the pictures of people jumping out of their bedroom windows with suitcases to flee across the street to safety in the West. After a few days, the East German border engineers walled up those windows that faced to West Berlin, putting a stop to that practice. People had consider other options now.

Bernauer is famous for another reason, its tunnels. Most of Berlin sits on top of a high water table, making it such that every time you dig for construction reasons you hit water almost immediately. Big pink pipes spring up around all construction sites in the city to drain the water out of the dig. Digging tunnels through that is just not practical if you want to escape, so people looked for higher ground. They found it at Bernauer Strasse, where an accident of glacial deposits left more moraine dirt and provided an opportunity to dig without hitting the water table.

As a result of this, the ground underneath the Memorial on Bernauer is shot-through with tunnels, caved-in tunnels, and counter-tunnels. This part of Berlin, due to the higher ground, also attracted Breweries to the area where they could excavate huge cellars to cool the beer during processing and storage. One of these old breweries sits right on Bernauer Strasse and Unterwelten has a special arrangement with the owners of the building to run its tours through these basements.

In the old basements and beer storage vaults under the street level, tunnel-builders went to work digging their escape routes to the West. Special guests tonight at this location were a few of the tunnel-builders themselves, who gladly shared their stories of what it was like working in secret underneath the machine guns of the Stasi partrolling the death strip just above them. I have never been so happy to know German since few of these guys speak English.

One gent posed in front of a big picture of his younger self. His story was that he and his young family lived on the East side of the street and were suddenly hemmed in the morning after the border was closed. He had some special permit and could cross the border, so was able to organize a counter tunnel dug from the other side with associates. Eventually the tunnels matched and we was able to escape with his family. He tells you this story standing in the very room he spent nearly a year digging out his tunnel with a group of secretive friends. Around us was the collected detritus of such operations: former bracing made from window frames to shore up the old tunnel, shovels, telephone lines.

They built a small track with a dolly to take the dirt out, and had to connect with guys at the start of the tunnel to signal them to pull the cart back out with a connecting rope. Then they'd push the empty one back down the tunnel for another load.

We walked through the rest of the vaults, peering down into a couple more vertical shafts that had also been tunnels (but were secured with grates now), then exited through a final beer cellar to the basement of the Unterwelten-rented house. There we unexpectedly ran into Janek and Sylvia, parents we met during the Vorbergstrasse kita days.

This was great in itself since we had not seen them in quite some time. But also Janek's dad Ulli was on hand. We'd met him before at parties at their house but tonight I learned that he was also a tunnel builder! Then we ate up his story about August 1961 on the night the Wall went up and how he and his girlfriend got split up, with her getting stuck on the other side. Try as he might, he never saw her again, but he still got involved in building connecting tunnels from the West to help others.

This was a revelation since I'd never known any of this about Janek's dad. He is now a member of the Unterwelten and on nights like this helps interpret that crazy history for visitors.

It was now getting on toward bedtime for the kids so Janek offered to take everyone home (four kids plus Rocky) so Cassandra and I could stay out and go to another location.

We took the train back up to Gesundbrunnen and walked across the street to Humboldthain Park, where lies the ruins of a gigantic air-raid Flak Tower. One of three the Nazis built to protect Berlin from air raids, now only the top levels of it stick out of the forest in the park. Fun fact: the word "FLAK" is an abbreviation for the German word Flugzeugabwehrkanone. "Airplane Defence Cannon."

The plan had been to raze it with dynamite but the structure proved nearly impossible to destroy due to its vastness, so they just piled up Berlin war rubble to the roof of the huge structure and left it. Now it is one of the largest hills in the Berlin skyline.

It is also an Unterwelten site. We grabbed a döner kebab and a beer from a Turkish food stand and climbed the long path up the "hill" to the bunker's summit entrance, located next to one of the former secondary small-calibre gun platforms. It was dark now and lights marked the path up through the forest, which was populated by many others doing the same thing. 11:30 pm.

We got in around midnight. They gave us a quick briefing, hard hats, and then sent off our group to explore the blasted insides of the former tower which had once functioned as a military site, hospital, civilian shelter and art storage location.

Tons of dynamite had done a number on the structure. Much work has been done since the 90's to build a semblance of a path through the cavernous interior levels of the half-destroyed building. Gigantic circular staircases had crumbled into an abyss, their rusted steel - reinforcing rod supports obscenely protruding from the walls left after the demolition blasts. Piles of rubble are swept into corners and the "path" meanders over them and up and down makeshift stairwells and platforms. Bat colonies thrive in here. The lighting is sufficient, but everywhere are dark corners, abysses and demolition evidence contributing to the awesome mystery of the place.

At length, we turned in our hard hats and exited into the cool night air on the former gun platforms. From the high vantage point, which you don't often get in Berlin, the city spread out. We could pick out the landmarks easily - a famous church steeple, the Tiergarten's Siegesäule tower, the curve of the Spree river in front of the Hauptbahnhof.

Another head-spinning night. Thanks honey for a great Dad's day gift!

Dinner in a bus

Or is it "dinner on a bus"? :) lovely flank steak and poached salmon at little wooden tables...

A de-commissioned bus in a back lot of Pankow serves as our date night location. Why I Love Berlin!

Photo blast of some recent activities

Some highlight pics from end of summer:

Summer Outing: Get on train, get on bikes, cruise around Brandenburg, return.

Klaistow berry farm outside Beelitz, our bike destination that Sunday.

This is quark, a relative of sour cream. There were some potatoes on the dish, but the gigantic pile of quark nearly abolished their presence.

Office Spree Boat ride. Every summer we board the river boat and cruise up through the government quarter downtown. Here's the Reichstag at dusk from the water.

Dinner at La Perla Ionica on Schöneberg's Belziger Strasse with Chris.

Jasper is experimenting with hair colors.

The coloring kit is a bunch of chalk pieces. Got it on loan from our rave-girl babysitter.

Last thing we see in the mornings when taking Jasper to school.

Berlin has no shortage of atmospheric props for its restaurants.

Date Night: Cabaret! The story of an English author who moves to Berlin in 1930, meets a showgirl dancer and the various other characters as the city parties away while the Nazi threat looms ever larger in the background. Made more famous by the 1973 movie with Liza Minelli.

Volkspark Jungfernheide is a vast park about 20 minutes away on the U9 line. We had noticed during a previous visit a "Kletter-Wald" (climbing forest) ropes course, so made a return visit to let the kids try it out.

Jungfernheide KletterWald. The kids get their harnesses all sorted.

They were super into it, except when kid-traffic jams occurred on the platforms while waiting for slow and clueless children ahead of them. Next time, we'll take them to the adult section which is much less crowded.

From Jungfernheide we crossed the north of the city to Volkspark Friederichshain to meet up with the T-bird group for a picnic. Cops told us that we shouldn't grill out since we were under the trees and if the Ordnungsamt came by they would give you a hefty fine. This kind of interaction would have been unheard of in Berlin 15 years ago.

On the "Long Night of Museums" you can check out nearly every museum in the city until 2am. The kids only lasted until 10:30, but we hit three: Pergamon, Asisi Panorama @ Checkpoint Charlie, and the Martin Gropius building. Next to the Pergamon an orchestra played for Berlin Ballet Company dancers.

Asisi Panorama at Checkpoint Charlie: a near 360 degree wrap-around image, a couple stories tall, of the view of the Wall from a corner on Sebastianstrasse in Kreuzberg on a typical day in the 80s. 

Walter Gropius House: Temp exhibit of "Garten der Irdischen Freude" (Garden of Earthly Delights). There were some definitely wierdo exhibits in here.

The old Schöneberg Malzerei (Malt Factory). Mothballed in 2008, now it houses art installations, tours through the dusty abandoned parts, and events like last weekend's Africa Day with music and food stands from many nations.

Handball is a bit of a craze as the Berlin team (Füchse - Foxes) is quite good. So we went to go check out a game with Cody's bud Hugh and his mom Coco.

Foxi the mascot

First week of September now, and the air is cooler. Perfect Fall bike riding weather. This summer was just a little too hot so we're jazzed to get back to the cool.