Berlin: Tuesday

So, Berlin Warning #1 -- you want to go to the Pergamon Museum? It's a neat museum full of antiquities, so the answer may be yes, but are you sure? If so, note (as we discovered the hard way) that the line to get in on Sunday gets to be two hours long. That's why we went to the Bode Museum instead, then went online and bought timed tickets for Tuesday to the Pergamon.

Which leads to Berlin Warning #2 -- you want to go to the Pergamon Museum? That's great, and well-recommended -- but do note that about 80% of it is closed for renovations at the moment. Like, there are currently three wings, of which two have gigantic, loud construction equipment all over them. And the third has half a floor closed. (And the fourth wing is still being designed, much less built.) So there's not quite as much There there as you might wish.

That said -- what's there is really cool. Where the Bode has tons and tons of cool little things the Pergamon is all about gigantic, remarkable displays. Like the main drag of Babylon, carried to Berlin, rebuilt and filled in with tiles to replace the missing ones. (It forms a hallway "only" eight meters wide and 40 long, as opposed to the 30 meters wide originally.) The facade of an entire marble temple rebuilt inside a huge room. Entire rooms that only contain a few items, because those items weigh eight tons each. A fair fraction of the monumental relics of the ancient world are in this building.

There's a measure of cultural appropriation here that sits a little uneasily: this is other cultures' artifacts that have been dragged over to Berlin to be rebuilt. OTOH, there are extensive displays on Yemen and Syria, and the destruction being wreaked on their treasures at home, that kind of drive home the the tradeoffs involved here.

It's fascinating and spectacular, and well visiting. But it will be much more worth visiting once somewhat more of it is open.

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(I didn't mention lunch. That's because we went back to Transit, maintaining our Asian lunch habit. Still great.)

Dinner continued to be European -- in this case, truly high-end European. As in, two Michelin stars. We weren't sure where to go for our anniversary, but having heard that restaurant reinstoff was going to be closing its doors at the end of the year, we decided to go for it.

The meal was spectacular, as one might expect. Typically for a high-end progressive meal, we ordered the seven-course menu, and it was actually something like 16 distinct dishes. Each was tiny (the venison was the main dish, perhaps 2-3 ounces of meat; some of them were barely a forkful), but packed with flavor and complexity. The Goose Liver was served both as pate and ice cream. The main bit of Pigeon was delicious, but the small block of Pigeon Praline was out of sight. The Potato Harvest involved potatoes at least half a dozen ways, with a powerfully flavored nut butter underneath, providing a punch of flavor.

It got a little gimmicky at times (the Green Gin and Vermouth involved a densely cucumber-flavored ice cube with a splash of water on top), but was pretty consistently delicious.

The only downside was the bill, which we had expected to be high but actually proved outrageous. This was partly my fault (I went for the fancier pairings, before realizing that the 22 Euros was per glass), but they kind of went above and beyond in nickel-and-diming the bill. Suffice it to say, it was the most expensive meal we've ever had by a wide margin -- a respectable fraction of the total cost of our trip -- and while it was excellent, it wasn't quite that excellent. So chalk that one up as a lesson learned to pay more attention to the price of a place at that level.