The Legend of Bilbao Baggins: Rain, Dogs, More Rain, More Dogs

      Who would have guessed that the most vegan-friendly city in Europe was the city with some of the most horrific, heartbreaking history? It sort of makes sense, that as Berlin continues to rebuild, it forges a new path with more compassion and understanding not just for all people but for all living things. Those Germans though (that one’s for millytweet). 
     The majority of my posts about Berlin will be about this crazy surge in veganism, but first our city guide will focus on that horrific history and the importance of paying your respects to it when in Berlin. There are some absolutely wonderful museums about World War Two that I’ll go over. Also, Berlin offers some really fun tourist attractions, including one activity that was without a doubt the most unique, crazy, and fun thing I’ve found maybe anywhere (infra). 

First, you know how I love finding fun street graffiti in cities. On Oranienburger Strasse, near the synagogue, we came across the well-known Tacheles Art House, which housed various kinds of artists and fun people after the Berlin wall came down. Also, ‘tacheles’ is Yiddish for ‘straight-talking’ which is hilarious. The commune is now virtually empty because a bank owned the building and evicted all the artists because obviously hordes of free-thinking people scare banks. I’m pretty sure no one knows what to do with the building now. 

You wouldn’t necessary think that Berlin boasts lovely green space but it does! People were hanging out and strolling through the parks. Ahnice.

I recommend making an appointment online to visit the Reichstag so you can climb up the fun mirrored tower and have a fantastic view of the city. You have to go through security upon entering. The Reichstag is like the Parliament building; it’s where the German bundestag/parliament meets. There’s actually a meeting room in the basement under the tower, so you can see through the glass floor right onto your representatives as they vote. Something about transparency this time around.

    One of our favorite museums in Berlin was, to my great surprise, about life during the Cold War and not about a dancing video game that boys I went to high school with enjoyed. The DDR Museum (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) shows what life was like in East Germany before the wall came down. The exhibition includes everything from the daily life of citizens and what they eat to and how they rebelled. It’s an interactive museum so I was never bored. You can even fake-drive an actual model of the car that East Germans could have. Like that one car they could have. It was a piece of shit to say the least. Anyway, the various corners of the museum house tremendously interesting information, including the pictured bits about the punk rock movement, how military action was jammed down children’s throats at a young age, and apparently how fun naked beach volleyball was. They also sold a cookbook of recipes that people would have made during the separation, which I don’t see anyone buying, ever. 

The important museum-going place in Berlin is helpfully called Museum Island, which houses five wonderful museums, including the must-see Pergamon Museum. The Pergamon boasts the famous Pergamon Altar and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, which we bought a paper model of at the gift shop. The Pergamon altar is an enormous stone room, pretty much, and can probably hold 100 museum visitors easily. The enormous building was originally on an acropolis in the city of Pergamon in Asia Minor; it was transported from Turkey to Berlin. The altar has friezes running along the walls depicting events from the life of the founder of Pergamon, as well as the battle between the Giants and the Olympians. 

The Ishtar Gate, which you probably recognize, is a freaking jaw-dropping structure that was originally a gate to the inner city of Babylon from 500s B.C., ordered into existence by King Nebuchadnezzar II, who had the unique of honor of having one of the first crazy celebrity baby names. It was dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the Babylonian version of Aphrodite. The gate in the museum is a reconstruction, but it uses the original gorgeous blue and gold glazed bricks. 

The Pergamon also houses this beautiful Orpheus Mosaic:

And the museum teaches us, as all good museums should, that a popular Jewish word for an idiot or jerk is also the German word for Jews’ favorite thing. 

     Oh, so it is recommended in guide books to go to the top of the TV Tower to see a panorama view of the city. But it’s expensive and crowded. Instead, go to the Park Inn in Alexanderplatz and pay only a few euro to go to the roof. You get the same amazing view of the city but you get the TV Tower in your pictures! Awesome! 

    Crazy signs like the above were lining the staircase up to Panorama 37, and when we got there this random amazing bear was waiting for us. The bear and signs were probably the best part, because as you can see, Berlin’s skyline is not exactly beautiful, at least not in this direction. And also it was often overcast. No big deal, it’s still the greatest city, just maybe save your rooftop viewing parties for like Italy. 

We passed some really literal storefronts as well, like the below left, my favorite, which doesn’t hold any information back. Also, the children’s carousel below right is super depressing. 

My favorite cathedral name probably ever is Berliner Dom because it means Berlin Cathedral but sounds better. You can climb up to the top, which is my favorite cathedral-related activity, and get even more pictures of the city from on high. When we were up there, I heard someone around the bend say “Philadelphia” and I screamed “Who just said they were from Philly!” And this guy came around to us and we chatted! He lived where I worked! Such a small world, and always smaller if you are willing to yell in public. 

Probably the hardest place to visit was the Topographie Des Terrors, the museum that shows, without holding anything back, what happened to all the various groups and people whom the Nazis persecuted in Berlin from 1933 to 1945. I learned so much I didn’t know about what happened to sick and injured people in various types of hospitals, including children with disabilities. It’s all really depressing and I couldn’t finish all the exhibits because it was just so difficult. But it’s really informative and I think it’s really important to go there. I appreciated that the exhibits didn’t mince any words. 

Right outside the indoor Topography of Terror museum is the remnants of the Berlin Wall, which has been converted to an exhibit showing more depressing information relating to the postwar era.

I definitely recommend that you go and spend ample time both inside the museum and reading all the information along the wall. But, you must plan to do something really happy afterwards. 

LIKE TRAP BERLIN!!!

We found Trap Berlin through TripAdvisor, because it was either the #1 or #2 recommended activity in all of Berlin. What is this random thing, you ask? It is a small room set up as a puzzle you have to solve before a bomb goes off. No joke. You and 2-3 friends book a time, and you go to a small room at the back of a café (information here) , in which six or so dark safes are stacked, locked, unmarked, and very little else is in the room. Aaaaand, GO! The clock starts and you have 40 minutes not only to start unlocking the safes SOMEHOW, but to use whatever you see to create clues and solutions. For instance, there is a small globe outside the safes to begin with. That’s necessary for finding one of the combinations. No joke. It’s legit crazy, so super stressful, and you have no idea what kinds of skills will be helpful. They say about 50% of participants actually diffuse the bomb (if they even find it – it’s in one of the safes. We didn’t locate it until very late in the game). My husband and I did it with our famous vegan friend Not Josh, so we had three fairly intelligent professionals with varying skills and abilities working together and it still felt like we were absolutely going crazy!

We also love going to the opera when we visit other cities, and the Berlin Opera did not disappoint. We saw one of my favorite works: Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore”, or in German “Der Liebestrank” which is not quite as lovely a title. The Deutsche Oper Berlin was a lovely venue and the company was incredibly talented. It was just fabulous. My favorite things about it were a) it was still performed in Italian thank the f-ing gods (when we saw “Rigoletto” in Vienna, they did it in German. It was horrendous. MEINE TOCTERRRRRR!) and b) while the audience clearly loved the performance, there was no automatic standing ovation like in America. Nice!

As for the Berlin metro system, it’s pretty solid. I wasn’t blown away by German technology and/or precision, as I fully expected to be, but I wasn’t disappointed either. The standout of the public transport experience was of course the sign at right. Beware of tricksters! That’s good advice no matter where you are or what you are doing. 

We also tried to go to Schloss Charlottenburg, the grand palace, but of course it was closed the day we went. No matter, the vast, beautiful gardens were open for strolling and stroll we did. We could have easily gotten lost in these many acres of ponds, bridges, paths, trees, and of course flowers. Luckily we didn’t. 

There’s so much more we did and saw, like the controversial (in construction) Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a visit to the synagogue that was destroyed during the war and is now a wartime museum, a walking tour that included the site of Hitler’s bunker, and many strolls on Unter den Linden boulevard. You must really do all of the war-related tourism, and in return there’s so much fun stuff to do as well! Berlin really offers a great deal in terms of honoring the past and enjoying the present. 

We stayed at the Mandala Hotel in Potsdamer Platz, a very nice hotel in a great location that I recommend.

Tomorrow and the rest of the week we will look at FOOD in Berlin! Yay!

​We’ve been together on this journey for a while, right? So it’s okay to get a little personal. Today we’re going to talk about what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World: China. No we are going to talk about health issues we faced in Beijing, and then be rewarded with a look at our hilarious attempt to fix the little baby laptop in a huuuge Chinese computer parts superstore center where no one spoke English. It’s like an interlude. La la la la…

Just to clear up any potential confusion, no, that lead picture has nothing to do with anything. We just saw it on the street.
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So, first of all, you think Beijing, you probably think air pollution. Luckily, the air pollution levels when we were there never reached high enough levels for an Unhealthy warning alert – according to @BeijingAir on twitter, the best provider for hourly updates and pollution levels. It’s incredibly useful and apparently trustworthy (run by the embassy, not by Chinese government, which has doctored the reports before, apparently). But even in the just ‘Moderate’ and ‘Unsafe for Sensitive Groups’ ranges, we were still uneasy about breathing in so much dangerous particulate matter. I mean, we were outside the whole time, walking around the super busy streets. So we did some research and found a shop in one of the business districts that sells masks. Not surgical masks, which do absolutely nothing, but legitimate face masks that actually filter out many of the dangerous particles. Doctor’s masks and scarves do zilch, p.s. Doctor’s masks, the ones they wear in surgery or at the dentist, and the most prevalent type you will see on people in China and other polluted countries, are only for protecting others (i.e. a patient) from any germs in the doctor’s mucus. They don’t do anything in the other direction, when the wearer is inhaling. It’s just a waste. Scarves, I imagine, are just as useless if not more so. 

We made our way on our first afternoon to Torana Clean Air, a smaller store than we expected with a small range of face masks and room air purifiers. They did have the masks we wanted in the sizes we needed, just not a big range of colors, so we were stuck with this weird octagon color pattern. Whatever, I don’t care what I look like if it’s keeping my lungs safer. The mask is called the Vogmask, and it helps protect from airborne particulate matter and “non-oil airborne particles” like dust, pollen, and, best of all, SECONDHAND SMOKE! I’m gonna wear this baby on the trains so hard! I know that obviously this sort of mask isn’t perfect, but it is good at filtering big and tiny particles, according to studies, and decent at the dangerous sort-of-small particles, so as long as it’s better than nothing and better than a doctor’s mask, I’m happy. I would like to get one of those total face covers with the mouth hole that you blow out of but like I’m already stared at enough here I don’t think I would be able to handle more. 

They were a bit expensive at about $30 USD, but that’s super worth it for something that is helping you not get asthma and lung cancer and all kinds of shit. I do feel like I can’t catch my breath sometimes here, so I will have to see a doctor when we get back about whether China-induced asthma is a thing, but overall it’s okay. Hooray for us looking like fools but acting like smarties! I like being healthy!

So, about that…

After we left Mongolia (hip hip hoorayyy!), I had some abdominal discomfort, like, in and around the kidneys. I was peeing a helluva lot more than usual, which by now you know is a lot anyway, and it wasn’t because of drinking much more fluid, so I was concerned. We decided to go to an international health clinic we had on our emergency list (we have a list of all the hospitals and clinics where we are going where mostly expats go, so they speak English), called Parkway Health. They made a same-day appointment for me and were so nice and professional and I love them. 

It was a hilarious experience, if you forget the part about me not feeling great. With my symptoms, they pretty much just needed to do a urine test. So one of the many nice nurses led me to the bathroom upstairs, but it was locked. She got another nurse, and they both tried lots of random keys to unlock it, but nothing worked. I was just standing around for like 20 minutes. Finally one of them said, “Can you just hold it?” I did my best to communicate, “Um, I don’t just need to pee, you need to test my urine, like that’s the whole point of why I’m here??” Finally they got it open and took my sample off to the lab. Meanwhile, I met the doctor. She was a lady doctor so in your face, riddles. Her English was slightly less wonderful than all the main nurses’, but still good and I felt comfortable with her. She asked if we had been traveling hard for a while, and I explained that yes, we don’t sleep we just take trains to random places for like months now. I said I had just gotten to China from Mongolia AND SHE SHUDDERED. She gets it. I said how we were pretty much in a car for 7 days there where I had to hold my pee all day and I was also dehydrated. She was like no no no this is all bad! Are you sleeping? No I’m not sleeping as much as I should be or usually need to. She was SO CONCERNED. She kept putting her hand on my shoulder like for moral support, that’s how upset she was with like, these very minor complaints. It was like if I became a doctor. I would SO be the doctor telling everyone to sleep more and drink more water and getting so upset if they weren’t doing enough of either. She was like, listen, you need to sleep more, you need to drink more water, you need to eat berries, especially red ones (amazing medicine). Then she hit a language snag and said, “You need…it’s in Chinese pingwan (or pingyan I don’t know)…just….lying down on the bed is good.” I THINK SHE WAS TRYING TO TELL ME TO TAKE NAPS. I love this doctor! The results came back and showed signs of infection, and given the symptoms was 99% a UTI. Which, given how many jokes I made about getting UTIs in my recent posts, shows that the universe looooves messing with me. 

​We went over the things that can cause a UTI and kind of just laughed:

Dehydration – CHECK
Holding urine – CHECK
Long car rides/travel – CHECK
Squatting instead of sitting when urinating – CHECK CHECK (all that business about how it’s better anatomically to squat is just for #2; for #1 for women it leads to incomplete emptying which leads to infection in the urinary tract which issss UTI)
Poor hygiene – CHECK did you READ the Mongolian outback post?

I mean, every single thing! Man alive! She put me on a cycle of antibiotics (and I’m all better, p.s., this blog is on a 2-week tape delay). I went to the waiting room and told Z the good news (not sarcasm; it’s a simple easily treatable thing, that’s good news). Then I said, “The doctor said I need to sleep more, drink more water, and eat berries.” Z responded, “Oh SURE she did. Did she also order you to pet more small dogs??” I almost passed out laughing so hard and had a very hard time convincing him that doing more of my favorite things was indeed doctor’s orders. 

 I’m relieved that we went to a real doctor who believes in medicine and fixed me up. And mostly, I’m super grateful for our UK health insurance, which covers us worldwide and immediately gave the clear when the receptionists contacted them so we didn’t even have to pay out of pocket first. We area so lucky to have such good insurance that covers us everywhere we go  – well, except in the USA. It covers us in freaking China and will continue to cover us in Kazakhstan and everywhere else, but it can’t cover the USA because their healthcare system is too much of a mess. Every other country is fine though! Jesus America. 

Okay that’s enough about my insides! Here’s the treat I promised you (plus one more hilarious treat at the bottom) about our adventures in Beijing’s super intense electronics scene. One whole section of the city seems to be electronic parts superstores, selling all types of gadgets but most of all doing repairs and crazy customization of gadgets. Little baby laptop’s fan stopped working, so we took it to this section of the city and just dove in headfirst. We entered one of the giant buildings, and were greeted with four floors of indistinguishable counters with Chinese guys gadgeting huge messes of gadgets. We went over to one counter that we chose randomly and showed the guy the computer and mimed a fan turning with our hands and then did a NO gesture. He got it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the part. We tried the next counter, and a guy was just not into trying to figure anything we were miming out (not as many English speakers as you might expect in such a city!). Onward! The guy at the next counter was in, and he rebooted the computer a few times and determined that the fan wasn’t actually broken, but that something was stopping it, so he needed to just go in there and clean the parts instead of replacing them. How we communicated this is a feat of human interaction and behavior because it did not happen with actual language. 

So we watched as he took apart the entire little netbook, because since it’s so small everything is under the keyboard, and he really had to take every last piece out. Like, we went down to the motherboard. Little baby was in 30 pieces! And to check if what he did worked, he had to put it all together again, all the tiny little barely visible screws that each have a very specific part they go with so you have to keep all these tiny screws straight and it’s a mess! Of course, the first go-round didn’t jive well with the computer, because it refused to work! So back apart it all went, a little more fixing, and then back together. Oh it was EXCRUCIATING to watch. How can people watch actual surgeries?! Finally he did a few more rounds of fiddling and it was back! It took over an hour of stress and just sitting in the super hot warehouse with people staring at us like whaaat are these tourists doing here. We also increased the computer’s RAM (I think that means it has horns now!) and we got a Chinese power cord so we don’t have to keep plugging it in with an adaptor, and it all came to I think 230 RMB, which is less than $35. Not bad! It was kind of fun to have the kind of electronics experience usually reserved to locals who have a clue what they are doing with electronics. It was definitely out of the ordinary and cool to see. 

Okay, one more random thing, I guess relating to health? At the checkout at most grocery stores we went to, they have tons and tons of condoms where in the USA there would be, like, gum and candy bars. It’s a little disconcerting but hey, China is serious about birth control which is good! But one brand jumped out at us and we were CRACKING up. 

UH HUH, that’s a condom brand called JISSBON. So shocking and hilarious! But it gets better, if you can believe it. Our Chinese friend said that jissbon is ACTUALLY WHAT CHINESE PEOPLE CALL JAMES BOND. So this condom line is named after James Bond! And it JUST HAPPENS TO SOUND HYSTERICALLY PERFECT FOR A CONDOM. Omg I can’t even believe. The writing underneath says something like “you can’t even see it”, something very 007 spy-like. Ahh it’s so funny! 

Okay that’s all the random thoughts I have for today. And don’t worry Mom I’m all better and it was like nothing!