Probably at the top of the list of sentences I wouldn’t have expected to utter, but seem perfectly normal at the end of two weeks in Berlin is: “Let’s cross the street here, but mind the naked lady.” Because women strolling downtown buck naked with a photographer in tow is apparently a thing here. (No, don’t bother scrolling down in search of pics.)

I was about to say it was our museum day, but we’ve had a lot of museum days, each with its own improbable delight. And “museum” feels a bit narrow a word for some of the places we’ve been. The German Resistance Memorial – yes, I need to write about that one at length – is equal parts archive and narrative and physical commemoration of the Germans who, in the 30’s and 40’s resisted the rise of fascism in their country, both “within” the system and, when they finally found it necessary, outside of it.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Ampelman shop/museum, which is a commercial glorification of Berlin’s much beloved “traffic light man.” And somewhere in between, the delightful (if under-air conditioned) Deja Vu Museum, full of trippy, immersive optical illusions.

Of course, we’ve spent more than the average amount of tourist time in the traditional venues filling the north end of Museum Island, at the heart of the city. Cruised the “Altes Museum” (old museum – 1830’s) a second time, sharing my favorites from the Etruscans and Greeks with Devon and my mother, then explored the “New Museum” (1850’s) in search of an exhibit on Schliemann’s Troy.” We were disappointed to find that it was in storage to make room for an Uzbek exhibit, but made the best of it wandering the Egyptians, and the fabled bust of Nefertiti.

(Note: the thing I love best about Egyptian statuary, in contrast to the dour, baleful sculptures of most cultures from antiquity, is that their subjects seem welcoming, often smiling outright at their observer. Couples often have one arm around the other.)

But the real surprise of the New Museum was the room right after Nefertiti, where folks were standing, holding cameras high, trying to get a snap past the “no photos” sign at the room we’d just left. The rest of the room held long tables with mechanized trays that slid out under glass to display one of four layers of documents.

While I was originally drawn in by a bit of papyrus with a song from two thousand years ago, along with its musical notation, the next tray over included an Aramaic translation of the 2500 year old Darius inscription that is carved into the side of a cliff in the mountains of Iran. This wouldn’t have grabbed me if Devon, my mother and I hadn’t just had dinner with one of my mother’s friends here who might just be the world’s leading western expert on the Darius Inscription.

And once I’d brought that to my mother’s attention, we found other treasures in the room, including the original of an Egyptian papyrus document that is absolutely pivotal for my mother’s research, and that she can (and did) practically recite by heart. No, my mom is almost the diametric opposite of Indiana Jones, but when she’s quoting letters from lost civilizations from halfway up the Nile, it’s hard not to picture her wearing the fedora.

Of course now that we had Devon in tow, we had to go back to the Pergamon and walk, yet again, through the Ishtar Gate. But the Pergamon has other delights from Mesopotamia, like some bits of Gilgamesh, and an early Assyrian legal code. Alas, it still condones wife beating, but also states:

If a widow enters a man’s house to live with him,
Everything that is hers becomes his.
Or, if a man enters a woman’s house to live with her,
Everything that is his becomes hers.

What else, what else?

And oh yes: the tower. I’d originally written an entire blog post on having drinks and dinner halfway up the Fernsehturm – Berlin’s iconic, 368 meter tall TV Tower. The tower is a massive Cold War propaganda relic of the now defunct German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), impaling a concrete and glass sphere halfway up that houses a bar, observation deck and rotating restaurant. 

It was designed during the age of Sputnik, and the high point of the Soviet lead in the space race, so the tower naturally tries to evoke that heroic imagery, though by the time construction was completed in late 1969 (over time and more than four times over budget), Armstrong and Aldrin had walked on the moon, and attentions were conveniently drawn elsewhere.

Devon and I had paid to just go up and have a beer at the bar, but whim took us and when I flashed my best smile at the mâite di, he said that he could get us a table for two at the restaurant. The meal was a delightful, well-served romantic thing of entirely passable salmon and chicken, but what made dinner special was the storm.

You see, thunderstorms had been forecast, but we’d found our respectively-followed weather forecasts to be so laughably out of sync with what actually happened in the sky above us that I’d repeatedly checked to make sure I was getting Berlin, Germany, and not the one in New Hampshire.

And yet, as the restaurant slid the landscape below us around at 1/30th RPM, there was no mistaking that while skies to the east were sunny and pastoral, a curtain of dark gray was advancing from the west.

Wall of rain on the left, blue skies on the right

By the time it reached the long green expanse of the Tiergarten, it moved like a living thing, swallowing the landscape, and flashing within. Tendrils of cloud rushed by us at window level as though we were airborne, descending for an approach through an undercast, and then the storm was upon us. Whooom! – suddenly everything was gone, except an unfathomable gray turmoil and the roar of rain pelting the glass sideways. I was sure I felt the tower quake just a little.

Conversation hushed, and those diners who had not already set down their forks and snatched up cell phones did so, snapping blurry photos that could not possibly capture the aerial maelstrom engulfing the tower. And then, just as quickly as it had come, the storm was past, leaving only dregs of cloud under a ragged, overcast sky, and picture after picture that just look like gray blurs. I don’t even remember whether we stayed for dessert.