Berlin: Wednesday

Last full day of Berlin, so we decided to do some more local history, visiting the Schloss Charlottenburg -- the baroque palace built for Sophie Charlotte of Prussia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Emphasis on "baroque", mind -- the place is very overdone to my taste. But the audio tour is well-constructed, informative and reasonably entertaining, walking you through the history of the building as you go from room to room, tracing the generations as they added more and more wings.

(One disappointment: they have the prince's Kriegspiel set, but the box is closed rather than set up.)

It's an interesting tour, and drives home the darker sides of the history more than most of what we saw in Berlin -- large fractions of the palace were bombed heavily during the second world war, and have been reconstructed to a greater or lesser degree. But the majority of the tour is of rooms that remained mostly intact.

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On our way home, we accidentally stumbled into the middle of an Oktoberfest fair in Aleksanderplatz. This was every bit as kitschy as I would have expected, and we only spent about fifteen minutes in it, but I will admit, the temptation to eat and drink way too much there was substantial.

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(Oh, and for lunch we violated our pattern of Asian lunches, picking up fast-food fish and chips in the train station on the way to the palace. We paid for this sin: it was certainly the worst meal we had in Berlin.)

For dinner, OTOH, we kept with the pattern, going for French at Sucre et Sel. Kate had found this the first night (while I was in horrible pain), and declared that she was dragging me back for our last dinner in Germany.

Sucre et Sel is a tiny, cramped island of France in the middle of East Berlin, maybe half a block from Hotel Circus. The usual gauge of a quality ethnic restaurant held up: we were largely surrounded by French-speakers, here for a taste of home. Kate observed that the place wouldn't even be legal in the US -- the tables were crammed too closely together for accessibility -- and they were running on what appeared to be a skeleton staff (two waiters, two chefs and a bartender), all of whom were moving flat-out to deal with the capacity crowd.

Dinner was great. We started with a cheese and charcuterie plate of delightful complexity, including one of the most perfect blue cheeses I've had and a goat cheese and jam combination that was my highlight of the evening. Kate went traditional for her main -- a beautiful duck leg confit -- but I went for another flammkuchen. The flavors this time were French (salami and blue cheese, with a salad on top), but it was the same cracker crust we had at the German restaurant the other day. I'm kind of in love with this preparation.

Sucre et Sel is definitely worth looking up if you're in East Berlin, but make reservations: it was still jammed when we finished at 10pm.