India.

 Long day: a short flight to Chicago, followed by 12 3/4 hours to Abu Dhabi (on Etihad Airlines), followed by three-and-a-half hours on Etihad to Chennai (formerly known as Madras), along with a large group of Indian Muslims returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca: there was some trouble sorting out their seating.

We've met our trip leader, Sudha, and four of the other seven people on the tour (two male, seven female, altogether). They all seem very nice, and the bus is air-conditioned.

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.

Photos

I've gone back and filled in with photos.  There's only one post to go for this trip!

Charlottenburg Palace Gardens and a Cruise on the Spree

We slept in a little on Sunday, August 2^nd, then went to brunch with Marika, her brother, sister-in-law, nieces and friends Gisela and Ulla on the terrace in front of a café on Stuttgarter Platz.  It was another perfect day, like the day before, and it was very pleasant to sit in the sunshine with good company and good food.

Afterwards, we said goodbye to the others, and now we had Marika to ourselves for the next two days.  Her suggestion was to visit the gardens at the Charlottenburg Palace, near which we could board a cruise boat for a trip on the River Spree through the center of Berlin.

We didn’t actually enter the large baroque palace, built in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, but we visited the gift shop and then went around to the very extensive gardens in back. 

After some time there, we hurried a few blocks, to the banks of the Spree, where we boarded a cruise boat to go up the river.  A man near the bow with a microphone narrated what we were seeing on either side, first in German, then in English, without notes. 

As the Spree is the river on whose banks Berlin was born, this itinerary took us into the very heart of the city.  We passed the Belvedere palace, home of the President; then the offices of the Chancellor, Angela Merkel; then modern buildings holding offices for the Bundestag, the German parliament; then the Reichstag Building,

burned in 1933, but restored, with a modernistic glass dome, since German reunification (we had had a tour there in 2011); then past the Museum Island, with the Pergamon Museum and the German Cathedral (we had visited them in 2000); then the Nikolai Quarter, which we had wandered in 2011), with the Television Tower’s tall, bulbous East German pride behind and above it. 

The ride ended at the Jannowitz Bridge, next to which we sat while we planned our next move.

We decided to have dinner at a restaurant that we’d passed on the tour, the Restaurant-Boat Patio.  This was a barge, floating in the river near the Bellevue Palace, that had been turned into a restaurant. 

We took the S-Bahn to the Bellevue stop and crossed the river.  I don’t remember exactly what we are, but I remember that it wasn’t bad, yet the portions were small, considering the price.

By then it was getting dark.  We went back to Marika’s neighborhood and checked to see if the Radio Tower was open, but it appeared to be under repair. 

And so, to bed.
 

An All-Day Birthday Party

On Saturday August 1^st, Marika’s 50^th birthday, about a dozen of her friends and family gathered with her for brunch at the Koenigliche Gartenakademie (Royal Garden Academy).  In order to get to the outdoor café, you go through greenhouses!  We were seated at a large table in the bright sunshine, were asked for our drink preferences (prosecco? coffee?) and were presented with multilevel trays holding cold meats, cheese, fruit, rolls and jelly, from which we could choose what we wanted.  We were soon joined by a number of yellow jacket wasps, but not enough of them to be more than a slight annoyance as we had to keep shooing them off. 

Most of us had gotten there by public transit (tram, underground and bus), and now we continued in the same mode (taking at least one bus, I think) until we arrived at the Wannsee boat docks. 

After a short wait, we boarded a boat for a tour of the lake.  The Grosser Wannsee is a large lake in the River Havel in the southwest part of Berlin.  It is the most important recreational lake in the city, having one of the largest bathing beaches in Europe (behind which we saw The Magic Flute in 2011) and having more sailboats in one place than I’ve ever seen. 

There was a narration in German and English over the ship’s loudspeaker.  We sailed across the lake to Kladow (which we had visited with Marika in 2011), then down the Havel, past the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island) into the Tiefer See (Deep Lake), and on until we docked in Potsdam.  It had been a very pleasant cruise, in the bright sunshine.

In Potsdam we walked to the Brandenburger Strasse, near the Brandenburg Gate (no, not the famous one in Berlin, but a much smaller one), where we got a large table out on the terrace at Café Babette.  There we had wonderful, gigantic ice cream desserts (I had one involving cherries and, I think, chocolate of some sort) and shared some cakes.

Then, we walked to the other end of the Brandenburger Strasse, where anyone who so wished could join Marika for Saturday evening mass at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.  The presiding priest, who spoke the most clearly enunciated and understandable German I’ve ever heard, was Italian.  The co-presider, from Cologne, spoke German that even Mary Joy had trouble understanding.  The organ was very good and played very well.

We then met with those who had remained outside and most of us took public transit back to Marika’s neighborhood.  She had spent much of the day before making what she called an “Imbiss,” a snack.  A month later, I have to say that I don’t remember exactly what there was, except that there was a lot of food and it was wonderful. 

So we sat out on the roof terrace until late.  My German wasn’t such that I could understand more than a little of what was said, but it was all interesting anyway.  There was a discussion of various accents and dialects of German, since the people present were from various parts of the country: Schleswig, Rostock, Swabia, etc.  All good things must come to an end, and gradually, we all said our goodnights, until Marika was left to extend her birthday into the next day with her former boss, Gisela—we later heard that they had stayed up talking until two.

A Digression on Yellow Jackets

We met a yellow jacket as an unwelcome uninvited guest at our Avignon picnic.  We would soon meet a number of its German cousins.  Many people call yellow jackets “bees,” but they’re not: they’re a wasp (genus Vespula).  They are about the same size as a honeybee, but with yellow and black bands instead of the honeybee’s brown and black, and, unlike a honeybee, they feed meat to their larvae, while the adults feed on fruit, flower nectar and other sweet liquids.  While they hunt and kill a lot of noxious insects, they can make picnicking unpleasant and turn hummingbird feeders into wasp feeders.

They start out with one queen in the spring, but by late summer a colony can have thousands of members, in nests built in holes, nooks or crannies of various sorts.  At St. Mary’s they made a nest inside the long, narrow metal lock mechanism of one of the doors, going in and out through the keyhole.  Last year, the man repairing our telephone line told us that they were coming and going through a hole in our house siding, below the phone box.  It turned out that they had a nest in the basement.  After the Orkin man had done his job, dozens of dead yellow jackets littered our basement floor.

Last spring, I decided to replace the old, decrepit plastic compost bin by our back door, and put up a new one alongside, transferring most of the compost.  I didn’t get around to taking down the old one.  A mistake.  Just before leaving for Europe, I noticed that yellow jackets were entering and leaving the old bin.  Uh-oh.  When we came back, it was clear that there was a colony inside there.  I considered destroying the nest, but I wasn’t sure I could do it myself, and calling an exterminator would cost money and lead to having to get rid of contaminated compost.

By last week, activity around the bin had intensified.  There were so many flights in and out that you would think that they’d need some sort of air traffic control.  For the moment, though, I kept a policy of peaceful coexistence.  That ended Saturday afternoon, when, entering the garage after putting some compost in the new bin, I was stung twice.  Yesterday (Monday) morning, the first thing I did was call Orkin.  A few hours later, the exterminator arrived, I signed the yellow jackets’ death warrant and he went to work.  It didn’t take long before I was signing their death certificate, while he showed me the sting on his arm.  In California, he said, Orkin gives bee suits to its operatives.  Not here.

I went onto our back porch and watched the old compost bin through the screen.  It was surrounded by a cloud of yellow jackets, wildly careening back and forth, at full speed, like tiny flying chickens with their heads chopped off.  As the day went on, this cloud got smaller and smaller.  One could not avoid feeling distress at such distress in one’s fellow creatures, or at very least unease.  They had lost their mother and sisters, and their whole society was destroyed.  Their world had collapsed and they themselves were doomed.

This morning, though, in the now-absolute stillness, I couldn’t bring myself to wish them not-dead.

To Berlin

On Friday, July 31^st, we had breakfast in the Colbert’s bright, cheerful and colorfully decorated breakfast room, then checked out around 8:30. 

We walked the few blocks to the station, bought our tickets for the train to the TGV station and went up to the platform to wait.  And wait: the train was late.  The train following it was late.  The train following that was late.  Our TGV train to Lyon was scheduled for 9:49, and it was now past 9:00.  We talked with a young Chinese woman who spoke very good English.  She and her friend were on their way to Mont St. Michel, and they had already missed their connection.  Eventually (9:12, I think), a train arrived and everybody who had been waiting piled on.  When we got to the TGV station we discovered that the problem (having to do with signals) that had stopped the trains going into Avignon Central had also delayed our TGV train from Marseille.  It arrived maybe half-an-hour late and we boarded.

As we already knew, the train had been overbooked, so there were people standing by their luggage at the ends of the cars, where you get on and off.  I got Mary Joy into her reserved seat, found a place to put my bag and went back to where the others were standing.  Once the train started, some pulled sown some seats from the wall and sat.  I checked to see if I could sit in the restaurant car, but the tables were mostly standup.  I came back to Mary Joy to see how she was doing, when the woman across from her, who was traveling with a teenager and a three-year-old, offered to take the little girl onto her lap and give me that seat.  They, like we, would be getting off at the next stop, which by then was less than an hour away.  That was very kind of her, and I accepted her offer.

Soon we were back at Lyon Part-Dieu Station.  We went out the front and there was the stop for the RhoneExpress train to the airport.  For some reason, the ticket machine wouldn’t take my Visa card, but it did accept my MasterCard ATM debit card, for a total of over 29 euros for the two of us, a price that surprised Mary Joy.  It was a half-hour ride along the line used by the trams, though farther, and I think the car was a tram car.  Across from us were a young Italian woman and her mother.  The younger woman got a round-trip ticket from the conductor, while she got the older woman a one-way ticket, handling the transaction in French.   The daughter was apparently living in Lyon and accompanying her mother to the airport for the latter’s flight back to Italy.  Toward the end of the ride the daughter laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.  Living alone in a foreign country must be hard for a young person.

At the airport station we walked and walked and walked until we reached the area to check our bags on EasyJet.  We did that, went through security, and walked to our gate, which, as usual for EasyJet, was a rather lengthy distance away.

The flight to Berlin Schoenefeld was uneventful, taking less than two hours, though, once we landed, the plane had to taxi a very long distance to get to the gate.   This airport was supposed to have closed in 2010, to be replaced by a new Berin-Brandenburg Airport next door.  When our friend Marika flew to join us in Venice in 2012, her ticket originally indicated that she would leave from and return to the new airport.  That had to be changed before she left.  Latest word is that the airport may open in 2017.  Or maybe 2018 or 2019.  Needless to say, this is something of a scandal and casts a blot upon the German reputation for efficiency.  Given the distance we had to taxi both coming in and going out, I wondered if they were already using the runways of the new airport, though my research hasn’t found any indication that they are.

Marika met us, joyfully, in the arrival hall.  We went out to the parking lot and got into her car, and she drove us into the city.  When we were settled, we, Marika and her brother, sister-in-law and two nieces had pizza for dinner up on the roof terrace of her building.  It was good pizza and very good company.