Berlin

Two weeks ago I flew to Berlin for a few days to visit a friend. It was a lovely trip, with agreeably plentiful perambulation and conversation.

The most surprising thing I learned while there: if the pedestrian light at a crosswalk is red, everybody waits even if there are absolutely no cars to be seen. So I gather that for a Berliner covering every surface with graffiti is a good thing but walking across a road without a green light is very bad.

I tend to think that the use of cameras interferes with the living of my life, but I did take a few photos while there. Here are a few of the Berliner Dom, which is certainly one of the most magnificent churches I’ve seen. As with nearly everything else in Berlin, a bomb came through the central dome of the church during the second World War, so what you see here has been rebuilt subsequently.

The requisite photo of the Brandenburg Gate:

Lots of palaces seem to have been the order of the day. Here’s Frederick Wilhelm the Second’s Lustschloss on Pfaueninsel, a small island in the River Havel a bit out of the main part of the city. I think I was more interested in the Middle Spotted Woodpecker that I finally found on the island, but, sorry, no pictures of it.

And here is the Charlottenburg Palace, a rather grander affair (and also reconstructed after the war):

Sydney