The weather did lend itself to some wonderfully dramatic photos.

We did our usual "city exploration" of wandering around a lot, and walking for many kilometers. It was interesting to see the shiny new, sterile sky scrapers and tourist zones at Potsdammer Platz, in what had been the edge of East Berlin, and then see the differences in architecture and lack of renovation just a few blocks further into the former East Berlin side.

I had spent a considerable amount of time in college studying Germany, in the context of US foreign policy from WWI through the Reagan era. It was fascinating for me to be walking through areas of a city that were walled off so recently, areas where a particular professor loudly proclaimed would never be reunited (I wonder if he's still employed?).

The society seems quite diverse (multi-cultural, visible presence of gay-friendly establishments, etc.). On the whole, Berlin reminded us more of NYC than any European city we've been to, except possibly London. That sense came from more than just the people or the fact that it is a large city. There was something about the architecture, the scale of the city, and the relationship between pedestrians, sidewalks, buildings, and businesses that somehow "felt" like New York.

We spent a long time in the Jewish Museum. The building is a stunning example of what happens, for good or bad, when an architect is given great latitude on a historic project. The exhibits, while quite good, sort of felt like "museum lite" to us. A large part of that was the layout (prescribed by the architecture) and an overly enthusiastic but misdirected attempt to put multi-media and interactivity into the exhibits.

One of the real strengths of the museum was the sense that it gave, to Meredith and I at least, of the loss to the larger community and society because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an central part of the museum, but it really did attempt to cover the history of Jews in Germany from about the late Roman Empire to today. That duration was both a weakness of the exhibits as a whole, and a tremendous, and rarely stated, reminder of the place of Jews in a larger German historic context. That's what left me with a feeling of the senselessness of the Holocaust.

The other museum we visited was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. This is a fascinating, and boring, account of the history of divided Berlin, with a section devoted to other "people's uprisings" (carefully chosen, and interesting in the omissions of groups like the anti-apartheid movement, the Green party and the anti-nuclear movements, the The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, etc.). The museum is built upon an obsessive cataloging of what seems like each and every escape attempt. The collection of materials is fascinating, but the layout and descriptions and anti-Communist bias, and lack of context are extremely irritating. [an error occurred while processing this directive]