Here are some of my favorite pictures from all the places I checked into and checked out around the center of Berlin.
The Sony Center with its spectacular inside-outside partial roof is close to Potsdamer Platz. I read that the whole business of rebuilding Potsdamer Platz and awarding projects has been the subject of much controversy from the beginning, and still not everyone applauds how the district was commercialised and replanned.Artwork on the manhole cover. I have to confess I cannot name all the structures on it .. just the Berlin TV Tower, the Brandenburg Gate and the Bundestag.A subtle advertising poster showing the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin TV Tower from the you-know-who beverage company !I went through Gleisdreieck U-bahn station many times the last few days. I love the metalwork on the gate.This plaque is of the House of Representatives building on ZImmerstrasse.This picture is a propagandistic wall painting at the entrance of the Bundesministerium der Finanzen on Wilhelmstrasse, promoting socialism in the DDR. I took a series of pictures to capture the whole thing.. more of the picture... more of the picture... more of the picture... and the final part of the picture.
Here’s my Reichstag building picture. As one can tell, it has been around a long time,(since 1894 actually), but was badly damaged in WWII and only fully restored with a new dome and all in 1999, so that it once again became the meeting place of the German parliament as the modern Bundestag.Yes, yes, I know the Brandenburg Gate has been photographed a million times, but here is my fresh picture from Thursday night! The gate is an 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch, and one of the best-known landmarks of Germany. Having suffered considerable damage in World War II, the Brandenburg Gate was fully restored from 2000 to 2002 [Wikipedia].Let’s see .. four hazelnuts on top of six pillars .. what could that be? Billboard from chocolate maker Ritter Sport in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. ‘Da kiekste, wa?’ is a local Berlin phrase. Translated into ‘authentic German’/ English it is: ‘Da guckst du, was?’/ ‘You’re looking, huh?’- as a reaction of the amazed/surprised expression on the face of someone else.I love the pointy roof on this building close to Alexander Platz .. not sure what’s going on inside, though.Here’ the U-bahn platforms at Alexander Platz. It also has an S-bahn (regional train) platform.I was fascinated by the clean-up crew sucking up the trash out of all the spherical trash cans around Alexander Platz.Here’s the outside of Alexander Platz. Formerly part of East Berlin, this town square certainly has not seen the money and effort poured into it that Potsdam Platz has, but this is being remedied right now to some extent.Here’s the Berliner Dom, the Berlin Dome Church in the center of the city near Alexander Platz.This is the Humboldt Box, a temporary ‘info pavilion’ (it looks so very German-engineered), to provide to public with information and updates about extensive construction and expansion in the Berlin city center around Alexander Platz, the Berlin Dome and the Rathaus.The entire area around the stately old dame of the Berlin Rathaus building (town hall, completed in 1869) is under construction. They even have tunnel boring machine in place similar to Seattle’s Bertha boring machine, to extend the U-bahn network.
The modern building for the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station) opened in 2006, all glass and steel.Artwork at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. See the man in the horse? And then there’s even another horse motif in the cover of the cylinder in the center.
I love this clock inside the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station). I want one for my kitchen (maybe just a little smaller!).Here is an ‘ampelmann’(traffic light man) decorative lamp, invoking East Germany/ DDR nostalgia (is there such a thing?). This little man with the hat figure was widely used in traffic lights in the old DDR. After unification the DDR ampelmann figure proved so popular it was put into traffic lights all over the city.This is the new building of the Deutsches Technikmuseum that opened in 2005. The old part of the museum is in a historic brick building. The two hours I spent there was much too short ! (I like the street sweeper machine cleaning the street ! .. can the city of Seattle buy a few, please?).This is a 1942 Lufthansa airplane model (so must have been just after WWII) .. complete with the the frame that could hoist the engine up and out for maintenance,I’m on the 4th floor looking down all the way to a wooden ship that was unearthed and rebuilt (I did not take notes of its age! Sorry ! and then almost at eye-level there is an old single man-copter.This ‘cyclops’ automobile is a 1923 design. It had 6 cylinders and could do 95 km/h (60 mph).How about this really retro desk telephone? Built by L.M. Ericsson & Co in Sweden in 1895 !And of course I want one of these spherical TVs .. only a small number were made, and sold in Sloane Square, London, in 1970.And this fantastic archetypical mechanical computing machine is a Z1 was built in 1938. It has an arithmetic unit, a memory unit and input and output units. The program that drove it was coded on punched tape.
