jducoeur

Okay, I jinxed it. No, there weren't any disasters, just a bunch of sudden and unwelcome stress.

Icelandair gets a big black mark for their computer system. Specifically, we got to the airport roughly the recommended three hours ahead of time. And as we were walking to the checkin line, I got a text message saying that our seats had been changed from 11A and B (window and aisle, reasonably nice seats that we had booked months ago) to 35C and 36C (middle of the place, not together, seriously sub-optimal for a six hour flight home).

Suffice it to say that I kind of lost my shit, all the moreso when the lady tending the line responded that they were absolutely within their legal rights to do this. Which is true, but not exactly a good customer service message.

Fortunately, the lady at baggage check, who checked us in, took the problem seriously, apologized, and spent about five minutes figuring out how to get us 34A and B -- not quite as good as what we had booked, but at least decent. I'm still annoyed at the airline (and given how expensive Reykjavik is, not especially inclined to take it again), but she at least deserves kudos.

Reykjavik airport does have a lovely, huge duty-free, full of all sorts of fun toys. I got a bunch of nips of random Icelandic booze to sample. No, I didn't drink them all on the spot, but it was tempting.

Stress, part 2: just when my blood pressure had calmed down, we got to the automated gates where you scan your boarding pass to get into the actual gate area. My luck being what it was on Saturday, instead of the nice friendly green checkmark I got a bright flashing red X. Yes, I had been chosen for a random TSA search. Yay.

(A TSA search in Europe? I dunno, but that's what they said it was.)

To be fair, they were very professional, and impressively efficient. But having to have all of my bags opened and searched, and my body swabbed all over, while I was already stressed about running a little bit late getting to the gate, did nothing to help my mood.

From there, the flight itself was pretty uneventful. Remarkably cramped seats, and an older couple behind us who could only talk to each other by shouting loudly, but as flights go, not horrible.

Let's end on a happier note: lunch. I had forgotten to mention, in my previous entry, that we had had lunch on Friday at the Sandholt, a couple of blocks from our hotel. This was mostly a testimony to the power of a good advertising board on the sidewalk: they listed a sourdough Croque Madame, which kind of jumped out and grabbed me, yelling "Lunch! Luuuuunch!"

It's a lovely if slightly chaotic bakery and brunch place. On Friday I had that sandwich -- wide slabs of deeply toasted sourdough with ham and buttery cheese, a fried egg on top and a side salad, all of which is right up my alley: it was pretty great. And Kate had the Duck Rillete "hamburger", which was nothing at all like a hamburger but was seriously tasty. All of which was good enough that we had the same for lunch on Saturday, along with a big glass of their local-brew Currant and Lime Soda (delish), and a pair of big sweet cinnamon rolls for dessert on the plane.

So that gets a solid recommendation, if you find yourself in town. They serve breakfast until 11:30, lunch thereafter, and everything we had was seriously tasty.

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.

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.

(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.

We have developed an official pattern for our food in Berlin: Asian for lunch, European for dinner. Today, the Asian was at Yumcha Heroes, which can be summarized as DumplingsDumplingsDumplings! We had the Black Beef, Pink Lamb and Shanghai Dumplings, and I was slightly startled to discover that the colors are meant literally: the Lamb are in pinkish wrappers, and the Beef in pitch-black ones. It's pretty clever, actually: all of their dumplings differ in shape and color, which presumably makes life easier for both the waitstaff and patrons. We also had the "Stripes of Beef", which I think is supposed to be "strips", but whatever.

Overall, tasty but not going for lots of seasoning. The Stripes of Beef were a bit overwhelmed by the soy-based sauce, and all three dumplings were flavored mainly by their different meats, with just hints of flavor from the other ingredients. I might be interested in exploring more of the menu someday, but it only gets a 3/5 from me so far -- the concept is great, but I'd love to see more depth of flavor in general.

The afternoon was focused on a walking tour, conducted by Original Berlin Walks. Their website only lists the official tours (which cost money and want reservations), but there are actually also secret, somewhat shorter, tips-only tours that launch from the hostels -- and the Circus Hostel is across the street from the Circus Hotel where we are staying. So we jumped in on that.

Our host, Campbell, was an Australian ex-pat who came to Berlin to study history, and as he described himself as having achieved the ultimate dream of every history major: playing tour guide. Snark aside, though, he was a great guide -- funny, informative and personable -- and I suspect he'll wind up a very good teacher someday.

I can't claim it was a perfect day for a walking tour: it was anywhere from spitting to seriously raining on us for at least half the walk, which in 60ish weather with high wind isn't optimal. But I think everybody (about 15 of us) stuck it out as Campbell walked us around highlights ranging from the Reichstag, to several major points where the Wall used to be, to a block of high-rise East German apartments (with a talk about "this parking lot where we're standing right now? 20 feet down was Hitler's bunker. Let's talk about the last days of Hitler, and what happened after") to finishing at Checkpoint Charlie (with a host of warnings about how very, very fake and Disneyfied it all is, and the various scams to watch for).

I was bemused to realize, as he was talking about the fall of the Wall, that I was the only person present who was an adult at the time. But given that it was a hostel-centric tour group, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Underscoring his future as a teacher, Campbell led us through the Holocaust Memorial, and then tried to get everybody to open up about their impressions. The word that came to my mind was "Kafka-esque" -- the descent into claustrophobia as you walk through it, the failure of the angles to be quite right, the sense of always being in public and on display even while being closed-in, all reminded me of nothing quite so much as Peter Kuper's illustrated editions of Kafka. Of course, some members of the tour objected to how abstract it all is, provoking some mild argument, which Campbell pointed out was kind of the point: this is a memorial intended to keep people thinking about it.

It was a hoot despite the cold and wet, and we were happy to give him a good tip. Based on this, I'd give Original Berlin Walks a solid thumbs-up, especially if you can choose less sucktastic weather.

For dinner (European, remember), Kate declared that we really should do actual German food at least once during our trip. (Which led us to a long digression about whether the phrase "American food" means anything.) We asked for recommendations at the concierge, and after deciding that Lokal looked way too trendy and modern for what we were looking for, we instead opted for Schwarzwaldstuben.

It was a perfect choice -- as I had a feeling it would be from the fact that we were almost the only non-Germans in the place. I gather that "German food" is also a bit hard to define, and this place is more specifically a Black Forest restaurant, but it's a delight: really a German gastropub more than anything.

We split a Flammkuchen -- a crisp cracker-pizza made with sour cream, sweet potato and chorizo. Which sounded intriguing but a bit scary (I'm not a huge sweet potato fan), but the flavors balanced perfectly, the sweetness of the potato against the sour from the cream.

Then we had the "Geschmelzte Maultaschen mit schwäbischem Kartoffelsalat" (thank heaven for online menus and cut-and-paste). This revealed that the second theme of the day was Meat Dumplings: five big triangles of meat-filled dough, fried in oil and onions -- vaguely pierogie-like, but more substantial and crispy -- served with a savory potato salad.

I took the opportunity to pair that with a half-liter of German beer (it being the right meal for that -- I had the Konig Ludwig brown ale, a fine middle-of-the-road ale that paired very well with the food).

And having noticed that the "Bitters and Half-Bitters" list included something I'd never heard of -- Borgmann Kräuterlikör -- I of course had to try that. It's a good mild Amaro, very cinnamon-forward with only a little bitterness, which I'd recommend to folks looking for a less-dangerous Amaro to try. (And they served it in the most wonderful glass: a shotglass-shaped block of glass, frozen hard, with just enough cavity at the top for one shot. I must have one of these.)

Another vacation, another set of impressionistic diary entries...

Traveling on Icelandair is proving to be a mixed bag. On the up side, the airfare was fairly low. On the downside, Reykjavik airport is a cold stop, especially when they ask you to exit right on the tarmac.

TIL that in Europe, exit-row seats apparently don't allow you to put your bag under the seat in front of you, spoiling an otherwise brilliant plan for a comfortable ride. And they put hard barriers between the seats, preventing the usual armrest-up cuddling. That said, nobody bought the window seat, so we were able to take the aisle and window seats, and have elbow room between us for our desperate attempt at a little red-eye sleep.

Our taxi ride from the airport to our hotel was fairly uneventful most of the way -- until we got to the main street, where there was a large (apparently right-wing) protest parade flanked by many (apparently left-wing) counter-protesters. Police had blocked the entire road: there was, reportedly, No Way To Get There From Here. So we paid our very-apologetic taxi driver, found a pedestrian-sized gap in the protesters, and lugged our suitcases via the kilometer of cobblestones the rest of the way. (Really, it would have been a perfectly nice walk except that big cobblestones and little suitcase wheels don't really get along.)

Not long after getting to the hotel, I started developing an unsettlingly ghastly pain in my right flank, somewhere around my kidney. Now, this is not the first time this has happened -- I remember it once on a previous flight, and Kate thinks this is the third time. Always during or after a flight, so kidney stones seems an unlikely explanation. But it was pretty horrible: only a level 4-5 pain, but absolutely unrelenting for several hours, enough to have me in tears at times. Whenever something like that happens, it drives home to me how people can wind up with opioid addictions and the like: when pain is that sort of constant, you'll do almost anything to get it to stop.

It wasn't until a while after Kate wandered off for dinner (leaving me to lie down and try to relax) that the edge of nausea finally turned into vomiting -- which, oddly, immediately sharply reduced the pain.

Kate's pet theory is that I eat horribly during and around flights (which is true), and my digestion is rebelling. My pet theory is that my belt pouch is digging into my side and causing some sort of internal bruising. We'll probably try to avoid both, and hopefully this will stop happening.

I spent much of the evening panicking about finding a proper power adapter. The front desk had plug adapters, to go from European-style to American-style, but those don't deal with the voltage adjustment; having looked up the topic the other day, I was all worried about that. Finally, in the middle of the night (once the pain had died down), my brain started working enough to remember that both my CPAP and laptop have transformer power bricks; looking at those more carefully demonstrated that both are perfectly content with European voltages, so I was worrying about nothing.

On the plus side, the Circus Hotel is absolutely lovely: not insanely expensive, and quite pleasantly decorated and equipped. I feel much too old to be staying here (the lobby is packed full of young hipsters), but our Junior Suite is reasonably roomy, all very new and shiny, and the area is right up our alley, packed with restaurants and shops. Service here is very friendly and helpful, contradicting stereotypes of German service, and everybody here speaks excellent English. (I am reminded that one of my subtler privileges is being a native speaker of the modern lingua franca.)