Two More Museums

A nonsequitur:

Even if I were dying for a wurst, I could not buy one from a grill guy. These just creep me out.

On Wednesday we went to the museum island. I really wanted to get a look at Nefertiti in her new [old] digs at the Neues Museum. I had seen her in two other places, but they'd just finished the Neues Musem last year and Rob had loved it and kept talking about it.

You cant' take pictures of her, so I took one from the professor's 330 class portfolio. There she is and she's stunning after all these years. This was actually just a model so she wouldn't have to pose repeatedly.

I stepped inside while he let the kids run outside. Maddie had already been with the students and the boys showed no interest. So I'm not sure what possessed him, but Rob decided to take them all inside with him. This was pretty audacious. The Neues Museum is the hot ticket right now and you have to have a specific time slot to enter. You must check all your bags, turn off your cell phone, watch where you walk, what you touch and take pictures of. These are standard in any museum here, but the Neues was crawling with guards in every room. Rob walked next door and used his annual museum pass to get tickets, then walked back and they let him in with bags and kids and stroller and all.

The Neue Museum was a beautiful old museum which was badly damaged in WWII and just recently completely re-outfitted and reopened. Except that the architect kept all of the old parts, stabilizing and preserving them, and then worked in new elements.
I don't know how, but it is a really harmonious, seamless, complementary mix of styles.
I had a hard time tearing my eyes away from the walls to look at all of the antiquities.
Eventually I went in search of a man with a big red stroller and four (four!) kids. They had been searching for horcruxes in the tomb room. And Joss was earphoned and silent.
The sun god Helios who is opposite Nefertiti on the same floor. He got a mostly new room.
A cool arch, echoed by two more, new and old, in the museum.
After our great museum triumph, we decided to head to one of the city's premier currywurst venues: Konnopke's. You should note that this was the line at 2:00pm for lunch. Rob and Will (in a red shirt) are all the way over to the right of the second support.
Knoppke's was recently the subject of hot debate as the BVG needed to move them from their longtime locale under the S-bahn. In the end, the BVG did move them, and gave them an entirely new building. Rob and Will actually got to talk to her about it, and she was rather coy, not wanting to say that it had actually worked out well for her.

Currywurst ohne Darme mit Pommes. Yup. That's it. Currywurst is a sausage covered with ketchup sprinkled with curry powder. It's served traditionally with a hard roll or with french fries. Darme is the skin of the sausage and so you can get this with or without the casing. I just don't understand how you make a sausage without a casing. Isn't that kind of the definition of a wurst?

One happy customer.

Not sure what this one is. But he ate it all.

Then we headed down to the Hackeshe Höfe. These are very hip buildings with connecting courtyards in the former Jewish quarter.

A stop at a playground is always good for the soul. This one was next to the Ampelmann store. Maddie bought herself a messenger bag with her considerable babysitting earnings, but I couldn't stomach the prices.

We found Bloch the Monster in the courtyard next door, but he didn't do anything for us.

Then we decided to go to the DDR museum. The kids did NOT want to do it. It was small to begin with and super crowded on a July afternoon, but we still had fun because it was so chockablock with interactive exhibits. Here the boys are driving the Trabi through the east, watching a film of the streets on the screen in front.

Will checked out an old prison cell. I can't help but note that we all stayed away from the interrogation room. You could put on headphones and listen to the Stasi barking questions at you. But why?

Sebastian tried on the soldiers' uniform. Military service was mandatory. And those helmets were heavy!

Joss loved pouring tea in the DDR living room.

Maddie and Rob had a good time trying on clothes from a full DDR closet.

What do you think? Do we look East German? From there we headed back to our own neighborhood to meet the students for dinner.

We took them to this place that serves massive sampler platters of Berlin specialties like buletten, kassler pork, eisbein, kohlroulade, bratkartofflen and currywurst (did I mention that it was invented right in Charlottenburg on a rainy afternoon by a bored imbiss frau?).

Dinner was so full of pork that we had to take the students out for gelato afterward. I asked Sebi what his favorite part of the day was and he said "I really liked berry picking." Ah well, pearls before swine I guess.