(Tuesday, Sept. 8, Berlin) I tried in vain to type up my notes on the train to Berlin, but my netbook kept bouncing around on the tray table, so I gave up and read the Berlin section of our Rick Steves’ guidebook instead. The surrounding countryside varied from flat green fields, to fields of mown and drying hay, to plowed fields now laying fallow. But around trees planted along the train tracks created a spindly forest that almost entirely blocked our view of what lay on the other side of the woods.
Even if the Germans have done nothing else right, they have figured out how to run their trains on time. We left on the dot, and arrived on the dot, not a minute earlier side of the posted schedule.
Berlin used to have several stations serving long-distance train lines. But the new, sleek Hauptbanhof (“main train station” in German) has replaced them all. The local “S-Bahn” train could have taken us within a block of our hotel for free, but mechanical problems have kept at least that part of the train line shut down for the past months forced us to take a taxi instead. (Have Berlin’s cab drivers have sabotaged the train system to line their own pockets?).
Our “business-class” hotel has a friendly and helpful staff, and our room, while not spacious, is just fine except for one thing: No air-conditioning. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but the temperature in Berlin when we arrived was still about 80. So we borrowed a fan from the hotel office, opened the windows, and cooled the place down, hopped in the shower to freshen up, and then walked several blocks to “restaurant row” near Savignyplatz where we gorged on perfectly cooked thin-crust pizzas.
