Checkpoint Charlie

I woke up curiously sore, and wondered if taking two yoga classes in two days had done me in.  Our plan for the day was to start out at the Turkish market in another part of Kreuzberg, then return to Prenzlauer Berg for lunch and walking around.  We got off the U Bahn, Milo whining about how he did NOT want to go to any Turkish market—period dot period (translated, I think “period dot period” means “and that’s that” in Milo language).  But we told him we were going, period dot period.  We did notice that most of the shops in the neighborhood appeared to be closed.  And it was Good Friday.  But we trekked on, stopping for a little extra motivation at a cool playground with a zipline and some interesting climbing apparatuses for the kids.  That seemed to help.  Once we got to where we thought the Turkish market was supposed to be, we realized it wasn’t there.  We asked, and found out that, indeed, most everything would be closed on Good Friday.  When you are traveling, you always always always need to have a Plan B.

Our plan B was to walk Oranienstraße, a large street we had read about that was supposed to be the center of Turkish life, and an interesting mix of shops, discos, gambling halls, and restaurants.  It did not live up to the hype, nor did we find any good food to eat.  We bought the kids some juice and regrouped, and then hailed a taxi to take us to an Italian restaurant, Sale e Tabacchi, that had been well reviewed.  We ate outside again, right next to a fragrant herb garden and ate food good enough to have come from Italy.  A green salad with fresh mozzarella, artichokes, pasta with clams for me and grilled branzini for Alec. 

We had chosen the restaurant in part for its location right around the corner from Checkpoint Charlie.  I had a fuzzy idea of what Checkpoint Charlie was, from movies and such, but walking through the museum right next to the site impresses one with the gravit of the oppression of those times.  Checkpoint Charlie was perhaps the most famous crossing point between East and West Berlin during the time that the wall stood.  It consisted of a small guard shack (a replica now stands there) and a watchtower that was removed to make way for the development of shops.  Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the separation between East and West Berlin.  For escapees who made it that far, it represented freedom. 

The exhibits themselves are neither slick nor high-tech; most of them consist of wall plaques filled with stories and photos of people who tried to escape and those who helped them.  When you see the variety of ways people attempted to leave—on a tiny kayak with a sail using hockey sticks to frame it, through a long and claustrophically narrow tunnel dug with primitive tools, in a rickety glider—you realize just how strong the human need for freedom is, and how impossible it is to extinguish that spirit.

As impressed as I was, it was suffocatingly hot in that museum, and after awhile I found a place to sit down.  And I stayed there until Alec and the kids were finished.  We caught the train back to Kreuzberg, and then strolled through the lovely cemetery near our apartment as we made our way home.  It’s a beautiful place, the graves well cared for and newly planted with spring flowers.  Racks at regular intervals hold the watering cans of the living.  The shade trees made it a little cooler inside, but by now my head was pounding too. 

When we got back to the cool of the apartment, I had just enough energy to change into yoga pants and a t-shirt, haul my comforter and pillow to the couch, and put on the sleep mask I use for flying.  I didn’t move for the next six hours, after which I went to bed.  So I guess it wasn’t the yoga, or the glass of wine at lunch, or the heat; I had some sort of bug, and I needed to sleep it off.