On my morning trip upstairs to find coffee, I was alarmed by the clear smell of burning as I stepped into the hall. That persisted in the lifts. And yet there were no fire alarms, and everything seemed to be working. Fetched coffee back down to the room and looked out at the construction site for clues, and sure enough: a workman seemed to be melting pitch in some sort of burner, just outside. The pitch had been delivered in plastic bags, like concrete, and he was breaking it up a bit to fit into the heater, but ultimately putting in the bag and all: so the plastic was no doubt burning. Acrid.
I had another solo mission this morning, this time to take Cath’s new jeans to have their broken zipper replaced. The clothes mender was in a shop underground in the U-bahn station at Alexanderplatz. Actually the address said S-bahn station, I thought, and looked there first, but it was not to be found. Google Maps only got me as far as the station: not much use with the below-ground structures. I wandered the Alexanderplatz subway shops for a while until I twigged that the photo of the shop-front that someone had posted had a tan-stone tile surround, but all of the shops in the Alexanderplatz subway concourse had tiling the same turquoise as the station itself. So up a level to the mezzanine: tiles matched, and lo: there it was just across the way. The nice lady with the pin-carrier armband spoke no English, but she understood what was required by inspection, and seemed to agree to have them done by Wednesday, as we needed, and she took my money and gave me a ticket, so hopefully that’s sorted.
After breakfast we set out to stroll in the direction of the New Synagogue, a route that would take us back past the Cafe Cinema in case that needed more photos, and a Curry-61 stall, where we might try the famous Berlin curry-wurst in its traditional take-away form. I got one in a bun, and Cath got one with chips in a cardboard saucer. Must be an acquired taste. Tried that now, don’t need to do it again.
The synagogue was appropriately grand and shiny in the sun.
Cath’s knee was starting to give her grief again (perhaps we over-did it with all of the walking yesterday), so we caught the tram a couple of stops to the little cemetery where a couple of famous people are buried: Bertholt Brecht and Georg Hegel. There were also many other, much fancier graves of the great and good.
From there we stopped for coffee at the Fotografiska coffe shop (nice space but not very good coffee) where we decided not to pay to go into the exhibits after all, but rather to head back to the Brandenberg gate and then look around the Tiergarten. Unfortunately, by the time we got there Cath was in agony and we decided to U-bahn it back to the hotel to rest up and look at photos before our (late-ish) dinner reservation. So that’s where we’re at.
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