Land Berlin

Today we finally arrived in Berlin, the last leg of our trip. The city is its own state, like Hamburg. The trip by train with reserved seats was pleasant. I've noticed that Germans have a knack for finding solutions to all sorts of common problems. For example: the car we rented displayed a little red circle above the speedometer. Sometimes it would show two little horizontal lines, other times a number. We had no idea what it meant until one of Nils's cousins told us that the number was the legal speed limit, to keep the driver from getting a ticket. A second example which I saw in Nils's cousin's wife Daisy's home in Hamburg (where we stayed for three days): a handsome armchair equipped with a cushion for the nape of the neck, hanging from two parallel cords held together in the back of the chair by a weight; this allows the sitter to adjust the cushion for comfort. Ingenious! (Nils tells me this is an old trick, but I had never seen it before). Along the same lines, I saw today in the fast inter-city train that the passengers' seats had adjustable cushions for the nape, held by a couple of hidden rigid cords alongside which the cushion could slide. If only Amtrak had heard of this system! Another very useful solution to an old problem are trains reserved for women. I saw that today in Berlin in the train station. That blew my mind away, and reminded me that I had seen a number of parking spaces near the entrance of a parking garage in Tübingen (the first stop on our trip) reserved for women. That is extremely thoughtful, considering how unpleasant parking garages can be (esp. when you don't remember where you parked). Since we didn't do much in Hamburg except being with family, talking a lot (I in my broken German), hiking and eating, I took a lot of pictures of the most beautiful things in a sea of beautiful things: flowers. Germans love to take care of their gardens.Read more