White Tiger’s Lair

It is Golden October in Berlin, it is getting pretty cold with a daytime high of (a high of 4C or 39F) on Friday and all the leaves are changing colors.  Mein Freund came up for the weekend so I went out and played tourist instead of sitting at home playing on the internet. 

I was not feeling well on Friday so we went to bed very early (8pm) and therefore woke up at 3 am Saturday morning.  As we were already awake we decided to take advantage of it. So we looked up the time of the sunrise and the best places in Berlin to see it.  6am finds us on the road to the “tallest mountain in Berlin” which was actually made from the rubble after WWII and with a now long abandoned American military listening post at the top.  It is out of the main part of the cite by about 10km in Grünenwald and along the way I saw what I thought was a very large dog in the road, as we got closer we found it was not a dog but a wild boar, actually it turned out to be a whole family walking along the road, 2 adults and 3 babies.  I tried to get pics, but it was too dark for them to come out well.  So, we park the car and hike up to the top of the “mountain” with 15 min to spare before sunrise to find… the whole top is fenced off, in most places with two fences. Shit…

Now of course I would not know from first hand experience, but I hear tell of you walk ¾ the way around the perimeter you will find a place where the fence has been bent away and if you move the big rocks placed underneath there is just enough room for a person to squeeze under the fence.  I also hear tell that if you go to the top you can climb up the siding of one of the buildings to the roof (but you must be careful because it is sharp and can cut your hands) and get a beautiful view of the sun rising over Berlin. Then you may find that the next building over has a handy fire-escape ladder to its roof and you will feel stupid for almost killing yourself on the first building when the view from the second is so much better.  Then if you are a wrongbär you might feel even worse when you realize you could have squeezed through two of the bars on the front gate instead of scrambling under a fence.  =)

Around 9am we were in Potsdam walking through the palace gardens, then through downtown Potsdam, then the Hollander quarter (with very good hot coco and cake) and a big open air market, finally back through the gardens and off to the Russian village and the “English country house”.

Finally home and to some interesting Thai food and again to bed early…

Sunday morning we decided to see the rise over Berlin from the Reichstag, I mean really how long can the line be at 8am Sunday morning… Well it turned out to be a good thing we got there at 7:40am, but the view was amazing and it was a crystal clear blue sky, which is something we have not seen often in Berlin this year.  Leaving around 9am, the line was already about 30 meters long.