More Berlin

Today was my first full day in Berlin.  My brother and his wife were at work so I went out walking.  My job here is to increase my walking distances so I plotted a route to Museum Island.  The route is a mix of very walkable cityscape and very nice parks with hard packed dirt paths.  I went about 8 miles.  This was probably a little too long despite the fact that the route was totally level, even and I walked without a backpack.  When I finished, there was no injury, just a bit of residual soreness.  No harm, no foul.  You don’t know your limits unless you test them.  At least that is what I have always tried to teach my 3 year olds.  

The walk did give me a chance to get a nice street side view of Berlin.  It is a gorgeous city with very walkable and bike rideable streets.  In fact, my first impression of Berlin was ‘Smart Cars and older bike riders’.  Both were all over the place.  Of course there were younger riders and cars other than Smart Cars too, it just seemed that there were a lot of both of them.

Museum Island is an amazing place with 5 interlinked museums with outstanding landscape architecture.  The museums were built from the mid 19th century through the 1930 and the buildings themselves are definitely part of the show.  Well worth a visit from anyone, even if you aren’t rehabbing a blistered foot.

I have had a great time talking with my brother and his wife who are both teaching PhD’s.  Their home is in an upper class apartment building built in the 1910’s which they rehabbed by taking it down to bare structural timbers.  An interesting technique (to those of us who are engineering inclined) is that the dimensions of those wooden support beams are 12x12 inches with a substantial channel cut into them which was then filled with dirt.  This was apparently a noise reduction technique from 100 years ago.  My brother tried to retain as many features of the original as he could and the apartment is gorgeous.  Lots of fun.

Tomorrow, I will try a different direction for about the same distance and Wednesday go back to Museum Island for more distance while exploring the museums that I just got to gaze upon from the outside.  I am still on track to return to Spain on the 20th and resuming the Camino the next day.

Buen Camino!