The Jetpacker

A couple of days ago, we were jolted awake by the frightening sounds of explosions.  Turned out it was just fireworks.  We’ve gotten used to the hourly performances of pyromania by this point.

Then this morning I was pulled out of a refreshing sleep by another alarming sound, this time from Jackie…

“OH MY GOD!”

Jackie stared out the window, eyes popping out of her skull like a cartoon, jaw sinking to the floor in shock.

“What!?  What is it!?” I said, fearing the worst.

“IT’S SNOWING!”

Megan Fox offering me a pepperoni pizza couldn’t even get me out of bed that fast.  I sprung off the mattress and hit the window before ever touching the floor, eager to see this foreign substance.

And there it was.  Soft, white flecks tricking down from the sky, blanketing the street like a really cold down comforter.

I sat fascinated at the window for so long that Jackie literally had to pull me away and force me into the morning shower.

You see, being from L.A., we dont get snow… ever.  So while most people probably view the snow as an inconvenience, we took it as an opportunity to unleash our inner children.

After stepping out of the hotel and taking tons of pictures, we headed over to the Pergamon Museum, which already had hefty line out the door.  I know, heading to the warm confines of a museum on a day it’s pouring snow… we couldn’t believe other people had this idea either.

Most times waiting in line is a boring and tedious precursor to the slow museum shuffle.  Not today.

We laughed when the slow tickled our noses.  We formed snow balls so small and pathetic we had to call them snow pellets.  We wrote messages into the snow.  With our fingers, people, let’s be clear about this.

But my long-time romanticized view of snow ended in the same way that my belief in Santa had ended… badly.  Jackie repeatedly warned me not to put the snow in my mouth, but I couldn’t resist.  The world was a snow cone and I wanted a bite.

It looked so delicate and sweet, like powdered sugar.  Living your life by the principle of “explore with your mouth” probably isn’t safe, but it hasn’t gotten me killed (yet).

Eating snow didn’t get me killed, but the taste of acid rain probably permanently singed a few taste buds.

When the flaky snow touched my tongue, it reminded me of the taste of wet soil in my mouth after getting tackled in a middle school game of flag football where the opponents conveniently forgot the object of the game was to grab a flag, not pile drive a frail and uncoordinated chubby kid with little athletic ability into the ground.

After a solid 30-minute wait in the throes of winter, we finally got into the Pergamon Museum.

The museum is located on Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site featuring five world-famous museums packed on an island in the middle of the Spree River.  The Pergamon Museum is named after the highlight of the museum’s collection, the Pergamon Altar, a monumental gate that existed in the ancient city of Pergamon.

What’s so fascinating about the Pergamon Altar is that it depicts a violent battle between Olympian gods and giant creatures on an absolutely huge scale.

It’s mind-boggling to think that this massive marble structure featuring sculptures of Apollo and Zeus battling giant serpents and lions was whittled into existence with such precision by people using ancient tools.

Sure, the altar that you walk on today is only a reconstruction, but just imagining what the real thing must have looked like over 2,000 years ago can make your head spin.

And to think that this was just the facade; the rest of the altar was over twice as long and just as intricately detailed.

The exhibition hall also features original pieces of the reliefs excavated in Pergamon.  Most of it is incomplete so we had to use our imagination to craft the story of this epic battle. If there’s anything we learned it’s that even gods can get their heads eaten by angry lions.

The Pergamon Museum isn’t a one-hit wonder either.  There are two other awe-inspiring attractions.

The first is the Market Gate of Miletus, a 56-foot high gate that once stood in the ancient Greek city of Miletus.  The gate crumbled after an earthquake 900 years ago, but the pieces remained surprisingly well-preserved by the time they were uncovered in the 19th century.  The pieces were then shipped to Germany and the gate was reassembled inside the museum.

The second major attraction is the Ishtar Gate, a 2,500-year-old blue-tiled gate that once guarded the inner city of Babylon.  This 47-foot high, 100-foot wide reconstruction uses materials discovered during the gate’s excavation.

The Pergamon Museum features so much more, but we spent hours taking in those three attractions.  That led to hunger.  And that led to a quest for a decent restaurant.

A restaurant we found.  Decent it was not.

We should have known immediately that the food was gonna be crappy — from what we could make out, the name of the place was Lunch Bistro.  Never trust eateries without descriptive or creative names.

Every currywurst I had up until that point was delicious.  Lunch Bistro ended that streak.

It took about 40 minutes for our food to arrive after we ordered it despite the restaurant’s small size.  By the time it came out, the food was cold and watery.  And this place wasn’t even that cheap.

Our frustration was compounded when we learned that the day-passes that granted us access to all museums on Museum Island weren’t good at the Neues Museum because it was sold out.

All the museums on the island are undergoing renovation — we read a sign that said the Pergamon Museum was closing for four years — and the collections are being shifted around.

The Egyptian artifacts, like the iconic bust of Nefertiti with the missing eye, were moved to the recently re-opened Neues Museum.  That’s the stuff I really wanted to see, probably because I accept everything that happened in “Stargate” as fact.  I guess everyone else wanted to see it too.

It seemed like everyone, including us, who couldn’t get into the Neues Museum went to the magnificently designed Berlin Cathedral, known for its extravagant organ with 7,000 pipes and stunning views from the Dome Gallery.  That, of course, led to a long wait that we didn’t want to endure in the cold.

So we started on our way to the O2 Arena to see a hockey game.  We followed the people clad in jerseys from the train station to the box office.  Here’s how that worked out:

“You want to buy tickets for tonight’s game?”

“Yeah, we’ve really been looking forward to –”

“There is no chance.  All sold out.  No seat.”

I thought she’d keep going just to rub it in — “Nada, zilch, nothing.”

It was looking like this day was a bust.

But things started to turn around when we visited the surprisingly cool Tacheles, just a few buildings down from our hotel.

This five-story building has an interesting history: first it was a department store, then it became the central office of the SS during WWII, and after it sustained damage in the Allied bombing of Berlin, it was largely forgotten about.

The building was going to be demolished in 1990, but squatters, also known as artists, had taken over the building.  When the city surveyed the decrepit building and found it to be structurally sound, they declared Tacheles a historic monument and let the artists stay.

Walking through the building, especially at night, is slightly uncomfortable.  Our heads were telling us not to ascend the creaky stairs of a dark building covered floor to ceiling in graffiti.  But we did, and it was worth the risk.

A band played what I think was music, but the jumbled sounds made me unsure.  Walls were covered in colorful murals.  Artists crafted jewelry by hand.  Others hawked canvases reeking of fresh paint.

I told Jackie that some of the paintings and drawings were so grotesquely beautiful, they had to have been created when the artist was high.

No less than a minute later, we walked by a room packed with artists sharing a joint.

The building saw a steady flow of curious people that eventually found their way into the packed, smoke-filled bar on the third level.

We walked down the street to an Italian restaurant we had eaten at earlier on this trip only to find every seat taken.  The waiter said it would be five minutes so we decided to wait.  A few minutes later, a couple about our age walked in and joined the wait.

When the first table to open up was a table for four, we agreed to share the table.

We had a great time sharing stories about our experiences in Berlin.  She was a German who moved to Australia for school and he was a native of Australia who was just as fascinated by snow as we were.

The rest of the night was spent comparing cultures, politics and lifestyles over garlic soup and giant thin-crust pizzas.  Yet again, a day that could have been a disaster was saved by a terrific evening.