a garden that brings a tier to the eye

so, we finally ventured over to west berlin for a look-see.

what a contrast.

we stopped in to check out a 'jumble' market, see what they had going on there.

we've seen a few flea markets on the east side, and they're your typical kinda thing. except with, obviously, more old commy crap for the tourists.

but this one, on the outskirts of tier garden, it was really something else. a little more like camberwell market, in terms of antiques and stuff, but way way more posh. all the punters where wearing tweed sports coats, smoking cigars and sporting cravats. or else they had massive bouffants, tinted slightly purple or over-tinted jet black. oh, and the average age was say, 79-ish.

if you ever wanted some brass door knobs, tiaras (i kid you not), full length mink coats or still-life oil paintings from obscure local artists that started at 500Euro, then this was the place.

if i had some more cash and was sans the hassle of transporting it across the expanse of the planet, i actually would have gathered up myself an assortment of some pretty nice shit. they had art-deco and art-nouveau bronze sculptures, mid-19th century hand carved dining chairs, and whole varieties of amazingly well crafted antiquities that were just begging to be cut up and reconfigured into works of questionable artistic merit.

lucy hooked herself up with a gory book of weapons and facts about the cowboy era in the western u.s. for a sweet 2 euro. we saw stuffed foxes, opium pipes, opera glasses made of ivory and so much more. quite a curious adventure.

then we sauntered off through tiergarten, thinking there was another market somewhere.

well, tiergarten is, simply enormous.

and easily the nicest park we've come across so far. for my part, i reckon it's top 3 nicest parks i've ever been to, ever. it was well awesome. lots of little billabongs, for which i don't know the german equivalent, maybe something like kleine wassersplatzen. 

this massive towering thing was right in the middle and must have just recently been polished up coz it was gleaming like nobody's business in the spring sunshine.

stumbled on more bronze statues, these ones incredibly enormous. and rather scary, frankly.
a female version of death, draped arrogantly (is that possible..?) on the sphinx, some dude standing on the crushed head of a lion, all supervised by some mega-ponce called bismark. i think maybe he was named after a submarine or u-boat maybe. anyway, he had massive chops, a fat belly and all the charm of a sodden dog's blanket.

nonetheless, the actual figure work on the more naked of the figures, was really awesome.

i'm still totally amazed that the yanks and the red army didn't obliterate these images of celebratory teutonic domination. all though, they have appeared to have been sniping at them, as there are bullet holes (or what appear remarkably like them) scattered all around the monument.

further on down the street there was a massive soviet monument to the fallen soldiers of the red army, equally ludicrous in its pomposity and arrogance, which still stands, gleaming and domineering, over the hordes of tourists who trundle around the brandenburg gate end of town.

this really intrigues me.
it's 2011 now, and berlin is fully german. well, you know, it's its own town, unlocked from its jigsaw puzzle past. has been now for twenty years. and on one of their main thoroughfares is a giant monument, glorifying the dead soldiers of a foreign, now defunct army and ideology. do you leave it there? do you tear it down? do you wanna have to explain to your kids, when you go past, why there's a god-like 20 foot russian soldier pointing down at him/her in their own home?
weird.

but then again i find the statues of moustachioed english gentry plonked on horses around my own home town as ghastly and kinda offensive.

anyway, saturday was not a good choice of a day to be idly drifting through the brandenburg gates, swamped as it was by busloads of gaping tourists (much like ourselves i spose). so we headed back into what could rather dubiously be called the 'real' berlin, where the actual living takes place and the contemporary culture is bubbling along with the routine and regularity of the inhabitants' behaviours.

one word - eeeewwwww!

i was hoping this was an ad for this cafe's amazingly flavoured, jamaican-themed, cannabis infused summer shake of hearty joy and juice.
sadly, i was left disappointed.

the babies in prams-lauer berg are really, REALLY starting to grate on our nerves. seriously.
we've decided the persistent whinging of the newly birthed berliners, the early morning crying, the street tantrums, they're all basically a consequence of an apparently rather flattened emotional disposition on the part of their parents. there's a million babies and yet we've seen no breast-feeding. very few cuddles. almost no attempts to quieten the screeching little banshees. parents are generally just oblivious to the hideous, glass-shattering cries of their bebbies. and everyone is so busy not engaging with each other, or interfering, that they all just ignore it.

odd.

the traditional start and end to a day out - gaudy coffee in the sunshine.
super-perfect.