The Jetpacker

NyQuil should film their next commercial in Berlin.  Right now the city is a living advertisement for a flu remedy: people are coughing, sneezing, sniffling, moaning.  Somehow I’ve survived, but some diseased germ bag that didn’t cover his or her mouth seems to have infected germophobic Jackie.

She felt achy and congested this morning, and standing on a train platform when it’s cold and raining while I try to figure out which train we need to take didn’t help the situation.

Luckily, a sympathetic expat sitting on a nearby bench recognized my confusion and helped us find the correct train.

As sports fans, it was worth the confusion and the longer-than-normal train ride to the suburbs of Berlin to visit Olympiastadion.

Berlin’s Olympic Stadium is no doubt one of the most famous sports stadiums in the world.  Hitler ordered its construction for the 1936 Olympic Summer Games as a venue to flaunt the “superior” Aryan race to the world.

Instead, African-American Jesse Owens won four gold medals.

There’s not much to do there when the stadium isn’t packed with 74,500 fans for a soccer game, so we took a short ride to Schloss Charlottenburg, the largest palace in Berlin.

Normally, we really enjoy visiting palaces or mansions with beautifully detailed ornamentation, opulent statuary and lavish furnishings, but I wasn’t as impressed this time.

And I think some of that has to do with the fact that much of Schloss Charlottenburg was destroyed in WWII and had to be not only reconstructed, but redesigned.

I found myself skipping through the audio tour at a rapid pace because the narrator kept mentioning how the rooms weren’t an accurate representation of the rooms that Friedrich III and his wife designed for the palace.  Paintings and furnishings were borrowed from museums, walls were painted a different color and decorations were replicas.

Some rooms were even still under construction, or at least they looked that way covered in tarp and devoid of color.

I guess I wasn’t as impressed not because it seemed fake, but because the reconstruction seemed inaccurate.  It felt like the people who redesigned the palace were guessing as to what some of the rooms must have looked like.

Even major attractions like the White Room and the Golden Gallery feature brand new frescoes painted by current artists instead of duplications of the frescoes that once adorned these extravagant banquet halls.

Maybe I’m being unfair.  The palace is, after all, a huge tourist draw.  I can handle reconstructions and replicas, but it didn’t seem genuine to me.  Like a supermodel: looks nice on the outside, underwhelming on the inside.

And just to make the bad taste linger slightly longer, the much talked about gardens were dead.  Admittedly, even dead plants look good when they’re perfectly laid out.  But when you’re sick and cold, the last thing you want to do is wander through 33 hectares of dead garden.

We wanted to go to the zoo and see Knut the polar bear, but bad weather combined with body aches and coughing took over at this point.  So we had lunch at a German restaurant (currywurst again), stopped by the mini-market and a pastry stand to pick up a few things, and went back to the hotel to have a little taste testing party.

We’ve all heard a lot about how great German beer is, so I had to try a few varieties.  Now, I’m not particularly fond of beer. In fact, I’ve only found one beer I ever enjoyed.

But for about a dollar a bottle, why not take the taste buds on an adventure to beer land?

Well, the adventure ended abruptly.  After only one gulp of the Hefeweizen and the Dunkel, I was quickly reminded why I don’t like beer in the first place.

Beer is not refreshing.  I don’t know why commercials insist on convincing us otherwise.

Beer makes my mouth feel like I walked through a desert without a canteen.  It’s like putting a vacuum in my mouth and sucking out every last drip of moisture.  It’s bitter.  It’s dry.  It’s just not rewarding.

The Berliner Kindl Radler was slightly more toothsome.  It sort of tasted like someone spilled a pitcher of lemonade into the beer during the brewing process, but that helped mask the taste of the beer.

The last beer we tried was another Berliner Kindl Weisse. A couple days ago I said I actually enjoyed the variety I had at a restaurant.  Even though it looked like glowing nuclear waste, I dug the sweetness of the woodruff.

This time I went for the raspberry.  I gotta tell ya, it was pretty good.  There’s only a faint beer taste under the sweetness of the berry.  Sure, this is basically a kid’s beer (only 3% alcohol), but if more beer was flavored with fruit syrup, I might be a convert.

I was already on a sweet kick, so it was time to eat my boredom away with a mélange of pastries.

Germans love them some apple… if its swimming in syrup beneath a sugar-coated crust.  I happen to like the same thing, so to get in touch with my (nonexistent) German heritage, I demolished an apple strudel in about five bites.

I also got this strange pasty that resembled a Petri dish growing bacterial clouds.  I think it was fried dough with sweet cheese pieces covered in liquid sugar, but I can’t be certain.  It was just okay… but I ate the entire thing anyway.

The beer, pastries and TV-viewing rounded out my quest to become a couch crusader.

Here’s the thing about travelling to foreign countries: we wind up watching a lot of music videos.

That’s because it’s about the only thing in English.  Sure, there’s CNN and BBC News, but they repeat the same four stories every 15 minutes.

I haven’t watched this many music videos since the days when I pretended to be sick in high school just to stay home and watch MTV.  That, of course, was back when MTV actually played music videos.

In Europe, they still do.  In fact, they play everything in their entire library.  We’ve seen a few blasts from the past like “Hit Me Baby One More Time” and even a few Backstreet Boys and N*Sync videos.

Don’t judge.  You know they made some catchy stuff.

Even better is late night MTV.  That’s when it goes uncensored.  They even call it “MTV What The F*ck”.

And in between videos there are dirty commercials, like the one we saw for an iPhone app that turns girls naked.  (Allegedly, it allows you to take a picture of girl anywhere and then some futuristic technology shows you what’s underneath her clothes.)

The problem is, every now and again, the TV in our room randomly turns black and white for about 15 minutes.

By the time MTV replayed Lady GaGa for the eighth time, it was time for bed.

Around midnight, we were jolted awake by the alarming sounds of EXPLOSIONS.

That’s not comforting when you’re in a country that’s seen its share of explosions in the last century.

When you’re in that half-awake state, you come up with crazy scenarios to justify the explosions.  Maybe it was a car bomb.  Maybe there’s a riot.  Maybe the hotel is on fire.

Nope.  Once I heard another explosion and saw a flash of colored light streak across the windows, I knew it was fireworks from New Year’s celebrations that were starting early.

Three days early.