Just back from Berlin, where I wandered around staring goggle-eyed at the truly strange landscape of meticulously reconstructed 18th Century buildings and the postwar apartment blocks that line the streets of both East and West.
Because I spent a day at a conference in the Schloss Charlottenburg, I didn’t get a chance to see as much of the city as I would have liked. Instead, I bought a day pass for bus and rail, and spent every evening jumping from U-Bahn to S-Bahn to bus. Inevitably, I was drawn towards the bruised monumentality of the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag, but also to the seedy vitality of the Bahnhof Zoo.
