Iceland and Berlin 2024

 Getting ready to return home.  Another collection of random thoughts before we leave: Berlin is enormous. And there is construction everywhere. All of the fruit we have gotten, in store, market and restaurants, has been very good. There are doner and currywurst everywhere :-). There is still a lot of smoking in Berlin, mostly outside. Scootering is challenging.  Lots of cobblestones,. Curb cuts are typically a couple of inches high,  Do-able but a significant jolt.  And the streets are very crowded, with people likely to walk right in front of the moving scooter.  Nonetheless, we have done a lot of walking, and I only got hung up a few times. The convenience and grocery stores we visited all had a lot of beer and wine.  Most of the convenience store aisles and about a third of the big grocery store. I meant to try an Aldi, but the closest one is a couple of miles away. There are many groups of young people wandering around,  10 to 15 or so in a g...

The plan for today, such as it was, was to go to Friedrichstrasse and hang around, and later go to the Zeiss planetarium.   The tower from our room last night   Paula at the Brandenburg gate Our wanderings took us to the main train station, the Hauptbahnhof, by way of the Brandenburg gate. Lots of construction along the way.   Paula and Isaac with gryphon   Isaac and me with gryphon We ate various things at the Hauptbahnhof, and got directions from the information booth about the best way to get to the Zeiss planetarium. The directions were excellent, but when we got there, the planetarium was closed for some special event. I was tired of wandering, Isaac is still sick, and Paula has had it with cobblestones, so we all came back to the hotel. Paula arranged for a cab to the airport at 10:30am tomorrow. Autumn colors

In the (late) morning after coffee, I went off exploring the immediate area around the hotel, away from Hackscher Markt. I found a Kaufland grocery store only about two blocks away. I think it's the same one we were at before, but we went "the long way" to it. I got milk, bread, and more jam. They have these stupid carts where you have to insert a coin to unlock it from the next cart. I had to ask somebody which coin (apparently 1 euro), but just as I was fiddling with it a woman came by and gave me her cart--left before I could give her a euro for it. After leaving the store, I noticed that this cart didn't have a coin in it. So I just left it loose for the next person.   Church   Old church and modern spire Later, Paula and I went exploring a bit; Isaac was sick and didn't come along. We thought about going up the fernsehturm (tv tower), but the line was too long. I'm still looking to fill some of gaps in my comic collection. We went to Alexande...

 We have been riding mostly the S-Bahns, which are above-ground regional rails.  (The U-Bahns are subways, the trams are local street-level, the Deutsche Bahn are nationwide.).  The S-Bahns cars have a  small gap between the car and the platform, reasonably easily handled by my scooter, so they don't require any special effort to ride.  The trains are long, with cars at both ends marked with wheelchair symbols.  Coming home from the zoo yesterday we were right in the middle of the train when it stopped, and it looked do-able, so we just got on.  The car was similar to the wheelchair ones -- no folding seats to make a wheelchair space, but I hadn't been using those anyhow.  Fine. Then we got to our stop, and the gap to the platform was much wider; wide enough that I thought my front wheel could get caught.  So I got off, and Dave, Isaac and a helpful passenger got the scooter off. Back  on the platform, I noticed that our station is...

This is a photo of the MarienKirche on the left and the Fernsehturm on the right, taken from the plaza in front of both.  The kirche dates from the 13th century, the tv tower from the 1960s.700 years on one plaza.

Monday was zoo day. The problem, of course, was that the S-Bahn stop for the zoo is the station with the broken elevator to the station that we need. So we had to get off at Trodelmarkt and walk to the next stop. Paula checked, and the elevator will be fixed in December (!). So I have some random pictures from the zoo.   Isaac and boar   Dave and rhino The zoo used metal statues as location markers, so the rhinoceros was on the way to the rhinoceros enclosures, and so on.   Paula and real rhino   Bear The rhinos led to a discussion of body armor.   Grumpy pink fish   Statue The aquarium had several tanks of various kinds of jellyfish.   Jellyfish   Anemones The sloth was exactly as slow-moving as the cartoons would suggest.   Tortoises   Sloth Paragraph. Or two.   Falafel bowl   Dinner! I was hungry, so we went to the aquarium cafe. They were closing in ten...