On this late-June visit to HH, I walked all the entire way around the Aussenalster (a large lake in the center of the city, connected to the Elbe by the canal I’ve shown you in some past posts) for the first time in all the decades I’ve been visiting HH off and on. These photos all come from that walk, which lasted much of an afternoon since I took it slow and easy and relaxed :-).
On the lovely garden path along the Spree, a memorial to Dr Magnus Hirschfeld & his institute for sexual sciences, destroyed (naturally) by the Nazis in WWII…
Above, the entrance to Borkum’s Heimatmuseum (a local history museum with quite a lot on its 19th-century whaling history, including a large skeleton of a sperm whale hanging in the main hall quite dramatically); below, the interior staircase built into the old water tower, which now houses its own museum of water and wetlands, from which I took photos you’ve seen in past posts, but of whose tower from outside I apparently failed to take any photos. Sorry.
This is the Panke, a creek that originates in the town of Bernau north and east of Berlin then runs into Berlin’s main river (the Spree) via a canal near the center of the city, in the process passing more than once through the divided sectors of both city and country back in the day, I believe. This is for now our farewell photos of this lovely bit of the natural world in the heart of this great city, which we’ve also shown you in one previous post.
Großfürstenplatz & the Tritonbrunnen in Berlin’s lovely central Tiergarten park…for those of you viewing this in email or on small screen who thus don’t see the metadata categories and tags :-).
Returning to Berlin in July for those work meetings gave me a chance to visit neighborhoods where the city was once and is now no longer divided. Yes, I still cry when I walk past these places and remember my own crossings of that wall when it was really rather scary, because you knew armed border / wall guards were watching you. These photos are all from an evening walk in and around the Berlin Wall memorial park along Bernauer Strasse, one of the streets along which the wall itself once ran. The lovely murals in the gallery below were on an apartment building in what was then East Berlin…I’m fairly sure…my dear brother, for whose book on the period right after the wall was finally breached I will give an unabashed plug right here, might correct me if he sees fit.
Being (back) on Star Island, with all its granite (check the links in the last post to see the difference, or wait for more to show up here), reminded me of Borkum, a very different kind of island than these granitic outcroppings here :-). Another of the photos I took when we climbed to the top of the old water tower.
Above, Borkum’s Old Lighthouse with, confusingly, a graveyard in front of it…and below, the New Lighthouse as seen through the plants and gravestones of that same Old Lighthouse graveyard.
Returning to Berlin in July for those work meetings gave me a chance to visit neighborhoods where the city was once and is now no longer divided. Yes, I still cry when I walk past these places and remember my own crossings of that wall when it was really rather scary, because you knew armed border / wall guards were watching you. These photos are all from an evening walk in and around the Berlin Wall memorial park along Bernauer Strasse, one of the streets along which the wall itself once ran. The lovely murals in the gallery below were on an apartment building in what was then East Berlin…I’m fairly sure…my dear brother, for whose book on the period right after the wall was finally breached I will give an unabashed plug right here, might correct me if he sees fit.
(so much world, so little time....) 