Those Fifteen Extra Minutes…

We joined up with Fat Tire Bike Tours in the morning, led by our American guide Marielle. She’s been in Berlin for about two years, after a brief stint in Paris.

Biking through Berlin was fun, although it is tough to get 15 people across a crosswalk before the lights change again. Luckily, drivers were fairly nice and no one was run down. We started in Alexanderplatz, under the TV-Tower, and then rode along Karl-Marx-Alle (yes, we saw the bookstore shown at the end of the movie The Lives of Others on this portion of the bike ride). I also captured the man shown in the photo with the giant balloons. We cut over to see the longest remaining section, about 1.3 km, of the Berlin Wall, known as the Eastside Gallery. Graffiti-style art was painted along the wall, but most of the original (and presumably approved) artwork has been thoroughly covered with standard graffiti for major portions of it.

This photo shows some of the wall artwork that I liked the most.

Although hunger was setting in at this point, we had one more stop before lunch: Treptower Park, a Soviet War Memorial. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this memorial is a well-kept park – very clean and well-maintained. This contrasted with Görlitzer Park, which we rode through on our way to lunch – it looked like a refugee camp for junkies in one section.

 

The rest of the tour brought us to visit the symbol of Berlin, a bear, and around various neighborhoods and back to Alexanderplatz for a return of the bikes and some much needed coffee.

Eventually, our group ended up at a carnival in the Neukölln, the 8th Berlin borough. This was really no different than an American carnival – rides, junk food, etc – except for maybe the views on the way into the park: pickpockets, people doing drugs (very small amounts of drugs are basically legal to possess here in Berlin) and the ubiquitous Berlin Buttcrack – I’m on my 5th or 6th sighting of someone’s butt hanging dangerously out of their pants. This developing story will be covered in later posts.

After being drenched in rain – due to those 15 minutes extra we shouldn’t have spent at the carnival – we finished with Thai food from Asia Tiger near our hotel.