Berlin II

Can you guess who is posing with Kristi in this photo?

Those that guessed the Berlin Albatross, mascot of Berlin’s Euroleague basketball team are of course correct. On Thursday night, Kristi and I went to see a big Euroleague Basketball game between Alba Berlin and Union Olimpija Ljubljana (Slovenia), where I was able to convince Kristi to pose for a photo with the mascot. While some decent NBA players have recently defected to Europe, both of these teams largely consisted of washed up Americans (Casey Jacobsen) or slow moving, good passing Euroballers who have mastered the pass-happy international game but will never succeed in the me-first NBA. The game took place at the new North American-style O2 World arena (owned by AEG) and surprisingly was packed (about 15,000 people). While we don’t need to go into the differences between the NBA and Euroleague at this point, there are some pretty big differences between going to a basketball game in Berlin vs. Toronto.

1. When you buy a beer, you also pay a 1 Euro deposit for your plastic cup which you are refunded when you return the cup to the concession stand (there was a huge line after the game of people waiting to return their cups).
2. There is a very large coat check in the stadium that seemed to be quite popular.
3. The snack bar had better espresso and cappuccino than most restaurants in Toronto. Also, the chicken fingers were advertised as from “free range chicken” and there was a wide variety of sausages available. We settled for beer and french fries.
4. The cheerleaders were absolutely horrible. Horrible dances, fat, lazy - definitely not the Irish Spring Raptors Dance Pak.
5. The introductions for the home team looked like something out of 1970’s roller derby. LOTS of dry ice.
6. Similar to the cheerleaders, the halftime show looked like it belonged in pre-reunification East Germany. Two guys bouncing on a trampoline in blues brothers outfits who then proceeded to lose the outfits and jump on the trampoline in their underwear. Not kidding.

We hope to make it to some more Euroleague games in Spain (or at least local Spanish league games) with the hope of catching a glimpse of Ricky Rubio.

Otherwise, over the rest of our stay in Berlin, we got our fill of starchitects as we visited the Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum (interesting building (though not especially exciting from the exterior), good history of Jewish life in Germany since the middle ages), the Gehry-designed DZ Bank building (uneventful from the outside but very interesting interior) and the Foster-designed Reichstag renovation (pictured above, great climb up the dome and incredible views of the city). We also went to the rebuilt New Synagogue which has an interesting but small on-site museum that covers the history of Judaism in Berlin and toured the Pergamon Museum, which is home to many of the Greek / Roman / Arabian antiquities that Germany “claimed” while conducting archaeological digs in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. It seems like there are an endless number of museums in Berlin and while I’m sure that they all have something great to offer, we had both seen some during our previous visits to the city and also, we didn’t want to spend all of our time wandering around museums.

On the culture front, we watched a performance of Schwansee (Swan Lake) by the StaatsBallet, which took place at the StaatsOper, a great facility. Between the ballet and the philharmonic, it always amazes me to see men and women eating giant soft pretzels while dressed up in tuxedoes and gowns. Similar to the philharmonic, we were able to get last minute ballet tickets, which ended up being fantastic seats. Starting 1 hour before the performance, they open up all of the remaining tickets to students / youth under 30 for something like 13 Euro per ticket. This definitely helps increase the arts patronage in the city as there was a huge line-up for the ballet tickets when we showed up and there were some people that ended up with basically 120 Euro tickets for 13 Euro (I think that our tickets were regularly something like 60 Euro).


The food highlight of the past few days was our visit to the foodhall at KaDeWe, the Berlin equivalent of Harrods. After a lot of exploring and debate, we decided to share a gigantic plate of French cheeses (pictured above), which definitely covered our monthly cream / fat intake, but was worth it. We were also able to enjoy some other local favorites, including schnitzel,Turkish doner and currywurst.

We will wait until our next post to address reader mail as this post is long enough already. We have updated the Berlin photos and will likely post later next week from Porto.

Cheers,

Jon & Kristi