We saw two big celebrities in our last two days in Berlin, although you may have only heard of one of them! The first was Boris Becker, who strolled past while we were eating delicious Italian food in the KaDaWe department store yesterday. That was pretty fun. He was by himself and wore a green Nike baseball cap.
The KaDaWe (short for Kaufhaus des Westens) is Berlin's answer to Harrod's in London, but even larger - in fact, it is the largest department store in Europe. We were really tired yesterday and the weather was no good, so we made it our only goal for the day.
We had a really good time wandering around the seven floors and looking at the beautiful things. Sadly they didn't allow photos inside. We spent most of our time in the gourmet food section, of course, which is on the sixth floor. Overall, we like Harrod's a little better, but it was definitely very nice.
Today we also felt like taking it easy, so we took the S-Bahn to the zoo! It was so much fun. And there we saw our second celebrity - the polar bear cub Knut (pronounced "Canute"). He was born in Berlin Zoo, abandoned by his mother, and raised by a zookeeper.
Knut is absolutely huge here. He made the cover of the German Vanity Fair (shown right) and a movie has just been released in German cinemas called "Knut und seine Freunde" (Knut and His Friends), which follows his story with the zookeeper and parallels it with polar bear cubs in the wild. It sounds like there are plans to release it internationally as well. So he's a bona fide movie star now.
Knut is growing up and he's no longer a little bear cub, but he's still pretty darn cute. We joined a crowd of fans outside his pen and watched him fish for awhile. It was fantastic.
Portrait of Knut
Knut with his newly-caught fish
Knut and his audience
Knut's happy fans
There were lots of other great critters to ogle as well, including these:
In other news, German transportation workers have been striking the last few days, which means no buses, underground subway, or U-Bahn trams. Fortunately, for whatever reason, this does not include the S-Bahn system, a more substantial and usually elevated tram line. We can take the S-Bahn most everywhere we want to go, including KaDaWe and the zoo, but it did not run anywhere near the Jewish Museum the other day, so we had a long walk at the end of a long day.
Intriguingly, Germany's weather forecasters are also currently on strike. We mainly watch BBC and CNN so we haven't seen what that means for local news programs, but frankly it's hard to imagine it makes much of a difference having them gone for a few days. The forecasts we see are rarely right anyway!
And finally, here are a few more photos from our long walking tour in the sunshine on Wednesday:
The Jewish Museum, famous as much for its highly unique modern architecture as for its extensive collection of artifacts.
The very interesting "Fallen Leaves" installation in the Jewish Museum. You are encouraged to walk on it and it makes a really loud clanging noise. It's a strange thing to walk on a bunch of screaming faces in the midst of all that noise - it felt a little wrong. I suppose that's probably the point.
We have one more full day in Berlin and then we will depart Sunday morning for Wittenberg. I am excited for our first big Luther town, and hoping for good internet in our hotel there!
