Berlin Museums

We're located in Berlin just north of Museum Island. The streets curve around and the names change every couple of blocks, so having a good map is helpful.

I think this is the Berlin Cathedral otherwise known as the Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church. It is on Museum Island fronted by Lustgarten Park.

Since Lustgarten is Mrs. Phred's maiden name, our first order of business was to get a shot of her in front of the park that was named after her illustrious German ancestors.

We take the Hop on-Hop off bus to get a feel for the layout of Berlin.

We hop off to visit two modern art museums. The painting below by Picasso has a sign that says that the circumstances surrounding its acquisition from 1938 to 1945 is currently being researched.

There is more Picasso here than we remember in the Barcelona Picasso art museum.

This surrealistic painting appears to be a collage of butterflies.

This one is called "the doll".

Not much is left of the old Kaiser Wilhelm Cathedral.

Checkpoint Charlie is a famous tourist attraction. We will see more of the old Berlin Wall another day.

The huge Jewish Museum is just south and a block east of Checkpoint Charlie. We spend about two hours there...it could have been all day but we get hungry and run out of time about 1/3 of the way through.

Mrs. Phred in among 49 concrete pillars representing Jewish emigration to other countries.

10,000 metal faces.

This lady came back to Germany to be married in 1965. She looks a lot like Mrs. Phred did in 1965 except she is a little heavier.

A famous Jewish intellectual troublemaker.

My father often cooked ham and eggs for this man when he came to his diner in Ithaca at 4AM....small world?

Graffiti in a back alley.

View from our room...A busy confluence of subways, buses, streetcars, taxis, bicycles, autos and pedestrians...We're right on the Rosenthal Platz, only steps from the underground.

Picasso Dogs

Barcelona, Spain



Perhaps the strangest sight in Barcelona is the cathedral designed by Gaudi. The work began in 1891 and, by the time of Gaudi's death in 1926, only one bell tower had been completed. The church is covered with massive scaffolds and towering cranes as work progresses 24/7 at a feverish pace. Eventually there will be 18 bell towers. Maybe we'll find a way to get back this evening and see it when they light it up.



Like all the cities we've visited in Spain, Barcelona has an old section full of twisting alleys. We wander down the Ramblas at night. It's packed with pedestrians, street artists, immigrants hawking flowers and beer and beggars. We pick a restaurant which promises Basque cooking. One of the things I get is squid cooked in something very black.



We decide to buy two day passes on the double-decker tour busses for the two days we have to visit Barcelona. Today we rode the bus for several hours and then find and visit the Picasso art museum. I'm struck by the Picasso dogs (white blobs with four legs, a tail and a head with two eyes on the same side like a flounder) in many of his paintings and also the many different abstract representations of a little girl called Margarita Maria in his Las Minenas series. As I understand it, Picasso became slightly obsessed with a 17th century painting of a royal family by Velasquez and did 57 interpretations of it, including many different abstract faces of the little girl...looking at them change was psychotropic...





The tour bus tape described this building as "torpedo-shaped". Mrs. Phred had another word for it. It's supposed to be spectacular at night when lit up.









But back to the Gaudi cathedral: this is a closeup shot of the strange asparagus stuff on the top of some of the lower steeples....



Our train from Valencia to Barcelona...A fast train, but it made a lot of stops along the way.