Reconstruction

Helen tells me that when she first started regularly visiting Berlin, a few years after the wall came down, all of the buildings formerly east of the wall looked like this one: muddy colored, stucco missing, pick-marked.

This one, at the corner of Zehdenicker and Choriner Strasßen, has obviously been deliberately "preserved" in a dilapidated state, at least as to its façade.

People here move so fluidly along the avenues and alleys, through plazas and around gardens. Coming from Seattle, it is hard not to be jealous of the surfeit, the abundance, the redundancy of public transit. There is a subway system; an elevated rail system; a street trolley system; a bus system. The society seems determined to enable mobility (literally).

Writing this from another corner in the Mitte area, also pictured. More from Germany später.