Peacock Island, Copenhagen, Home and What's Next

After breakfast on Monday, August 3^rd, Marika drove us back to Wannsee, where we parked in the woods near the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul (not the Catholic one in Potsdam, but a small, Protestant chapel overlooking the Havel River).  We had seen this pretty little church from the lake cruise on Saturday.  After looking around inside, we walked down to the little ferry that crosses a narrow part of the Havel to the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island). 

The island was used by nineteenth-century Prussian kings as a sort of summer playground, with a fake “ruined” castle (of wood painted to look like stone)

a garden, a dairy designed to look like a ruined abbey—there is now a small herd of water buffalo on the island—and a menagerie.  The last was disbanded when the Berlin Zoo opened, but peacocks remain, wandering around the island. 

We spent several hours wandering around, seeing what is to be seen—Marika had never been there.  We stopped for a snack at an outdoor café, but our choice in cakes was limited by the fact that, for instance, the pear-cake was covered with yellow jackets, burying their heads in the fruit on top.  We got a slice of something else.

We left the island and went back into the city, hoping to get an early dinner at Engelbecken, one of our favorite restaurants, but it wasn’t open yet, so we ate instead at a cafe across the street.

Now it was time to go, so we piled into Marika’s car and she drove us out to Schoenefeld Airport.  We checked our luggage with EasyJet again, then said goodbye to Marika and went through security, which was not as tough as the very strict security at Lyon St.-Exupery.  That had been more complicated than any we’d had in the U.S.

The 8:15 p.m. flight to Copenhagen, after another very long taxi, to the takeoff point, was uneventful.  We arrived on time (9:25) or earlier, checked in, on a machine, for our flights back home the next day, then took the Metro again to Kongens Nytorv.  We walked from there a few blocks to our hotel, Wakeup Copenhagen Borgergade.  This is a rather odd hotel--simple, ultra-Danish-Modern in design, with very small rooms that waste no space and are aimed at the 21^st-century traveler.  There is free WiFi, of course, but no room phone—doesn’t everyone have a cell phone, so why would they need a room phone?

We were up the next morning before 4 a.m., checked out, caught the Metro (which runs all night, on a reduced schedule) to the airport, and got into a very long security line.  It moved pretty quickly, though.

We left on the 8:20 Delta flight to JFK, arriving at 10:59.  They served breakfast on the plane (I forget what).  Not having traveled outside the country for three years, we were surprised that I didn’t have to spend time on the plane filling out a customs form.  We discovered on arrival at passport control that the customs and immigration process has largely been automated.  We were told to go to any one of dozens of machines, as long as it was showing a green light.  There I swiped my passport, posed for a picture, answered questions about how much and what we’d brought back and whether we’d petted cows, etc.  Then a white slip with my picture and writing on it was printed out.  Mary Joy then swiped her passport and posed for her picture and got her printed slip.  We were then directed into line to wait for someone to look at and stamp our slips.

Next we went past the baggage carrousels (we hadn’t checked our bags on this flight) to the customs desk, and we were through. 

We had to go through security again, then find our gate and wait for our 4:15 flight home.  We had lunch at Panda Express.

We arrived at MSP before the scheduled 6:42 arrival time and took a taxi home

Our next trip, in a few months, will be to India.  I have decided that I will no longer be blogging trips in the same blow-by-blow detail as in the past.  I used to be able to relax on trips, using travel time to read: I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel in 2000 on trains in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.  I read most of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Spanish on a cruise boat on the Yangtze River.  Blogging the way I have been doing it is very labor- and time-intensive, and, quite frankly, too much work.

I intend to keep this up, but more as a notebook for impressions and anecdotes, no longer as a detailed description of how we went about getting from Point A to Point B.