Last day in the last city on this trip: Berlin. So different than the storybook quaintness of Prague or the classical elegance of Vienna, Berlin is a mixture of post WWII buildings, a few older structures pockmarked with shrapnel as a reminder of the war, and remnants and reminders of the Berlin Wall. The whole two week trip had been planned as a quirky holiday to see more Caravaggio paintings (and that’s been wonderful), but it’s also been a great— dare I say post pandemic? adventurous holiday. And a chance to drink a lot of great German beer.
A bit of backstory: there used to be five Caravaggio paintings in Berlin but three were destroyed here when the flak tower they were stored in had a fire during WWII. Ever since I learned this I doubted that it was true— at least one of them is very small portrait, similar in size to the Mona Lisa— so my theory is that someone picked it up and tucked it under their arm back then and their naive grandson has it hanging in their condo somewhere here. In fact, a tiny bit of me thought if I just walked around snooping through condo windows here over these three days I’d probably find it, and become a celebrated darling of the art history world— but alas, no.
But I feel like we’ve walked around the city enough to say we tried. I mean we have walked. So last night we decided to treat ourselves by strolling to a great big beer garden in the park and we got really, really, soused. By accident. I’m not even sure how it happened— it had been a super hot day and we hadn’t eaten much and at the end of the day we’d walked on heavy legs quite far to find this place— so the beer was cold and went down fast. It was touch and go for a bit there.
“I’ve got the spins, can I just lie down here for a bit?”
“Steve, no. We’ll get kicked out.”
“So?”
“We’ll get kicked out in German which seems worse. Plus are you just gonna lie down outside a beer garden then? Look it’s all stinging nettles.”
“How am I gonna walk to the bathroom?”
And so on. We had an elaborate plan to save a bit of beer in one glass so we could pretend to spill it on his shorts in case he had to just pee in place... you know, so it looked like spilled beer on his shorts instead of pee. Then we had the brilliant idea to maybe we should get some food to soak up some of the alcohol— but who was going to do this? Walk over to the food court area and order and pay for food when menus are all in German? And carry it back on a tray? Navigating the bathroom was too difficult, so this felt NASA level complicated. Finding a missing Caravaggio seemed easier in that moment.
In the end the task fell to me and even then I screwed it up. The German word for pizza is ‘pizza’ but somehow I managed to order us a handful of arugula instead. “Just this?” The pizza guy indicated, in German, as he held up leaves. “Nein!” I said, possibly a little too hysterically. Luckily pointing helps. So in the end we got pizza and paid (and peed!) AND somehow stumbled drunkenly home through the beautiful Tiergarten, probably a little bit too loudly, back to our hotel.
Taking it easy today :)
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