It was cool - I get the impression Berlin is always cool - and busy with a big-city edge as I stepped off at Lichtenburg Station into a proletarian grey concrete landscape of railway sidings, heavy industry and tower blocks, Turkish coffee shops littering the high street, off which the capital's notorious skinheads lurk. But skinheads are skinheads everywhere, so don't worry about them.
September 11 just gone, from the S-Bahn I watched this plane dive-bombing into the centre of town, and it gave me a jolt, until I realised it was static, hanging from a wire, going nowhere other than its perch above the German Technical Museum.
Give peace a chance, baby.
Having hooked up with a couple of dodgy Moroccan space-cadets for a chunk of their country's finest ... maybe only ... export, I disappeared into East Berlin for lunch at one of the best restaurants (see photo below) from Cold War days when the eastern half of the city plus the rest of East Germany were under direct control from the Soviet Union's Kremlin citadel in Moscow. It was closed, so I got a 3 Euro hot dog on the street.
Back on the western side I went to see the apes. During World war II the zoo had been bombed and so all the animals escaped and could be seen wandering through the city's rubble, a story that inspired U2 to write the song Zoo Station, and me to go vegetarian ... for a few days.
It's on Kurfurstendamm Street - Kudamm for short - the heart of the former British sector in West Berlin. This division, throughout the cold war, saw the French in control of the north, and the Yanks in the southern sector, with its enormous Templehof Airfield, today serving as an emergency refugee camp. The affluence of the neighborhood is in stark contrast to the great swathes of Workers of the World Unite Stalinist architecture to the East.
The shops here aren't shops, they are boutiques and sell swanky threads; Mercedes Benz has a showroom with million dollar sports cars on the pavement, next to Gucci handbags, along Kudamm, where retired spies and Arab businessmen sip coffee on cafe terraces, watching the world go by from behind newspapers. And that world going by is a multi-national, all creeds and colours festival of the common global man and woman, complete with a shed-load of sassy, leggy, urban chicks marching about.
In my bounding eagerness to get down to the boozer I forgot the camera-phone and so with the appliance of science I got this street view of the pub (see left) from Google and took a photo of it from my desk at home. Shame the drunken American from South Carolina isn't staggering out the door bellowing "Who wants to go to the Irish bar?"
Stop off at the Holocaust Memorial next to the Tiergarten and contemplate man's ability to systematically wipe out millions of people ... then head two hours south onto Dresden, a compact, flat and pleasant city through which the Elbe River gently meanders. Follow the water downstream - it reaches the North Sea just past Hamburg - but don't go that far, stop at Pfunds Mlokerei dairy for a glass of udder fresh milk before hitting the road once more.