Berlin Sunday 5 June

I've now added this picture of the Serbian Church

After checking out how to get there yesterday, we had no difficulty getting to the Serbian Orthodox church. We can't decide whether it's in the Wedding or the Prenzlauer Berg district, but it's in the former East Berlin. I suspect that the building may be a former Lutheran church. The singing/chanting during the service was very impressive, and afterwards we were made most welcome over coffee/cakes/sparkling wine/beer (we declined the latter). Needless to say, there was some political discussion (so Sue tells me, since it was all in Serbian), but at a fairly general level (and basically similar views were expressed on both sides).

Sue then engaged in some retail therapy in and around KaDeWe, but Tiffany, Gucci, Chanel and the other designer names missed out as Sue only made limited purchases (including a massage ball for the soles of her feet, after all the walking). Meantime, I went off to Miniatur Welten Berlin. I didn't know this existed, but Sue found it in Lonely Planet, which says that this claims to be the world's largest model railway. I had previously thought this title belonged to a model railway in Hamburg, and I had originally planned to go up to Hamburg to see it. However, the need to go to Hamburg was eliminated if all I had to do was to go to Alexanderplatz, which I did, and I was indeed “wowed”.

Added:   model of Zoo station, Berlin

 All the stations are modelled on actual German stations (including several of the Berlin stations), the trains authentically represent U-bahn, S-bahn, regional and ICE trains, plus lots of freight trains, there are trams, a Luna Park, a military establishment (complete with marching band music), a power station, and an airport. At the airport, planes land and take off, the departure board which you can see inside the terminal changes as flights depart and much, much more. The trains don't just go around in circles, either. There's at least one major junction where trains merge and cross over, and operate in alternate directions over the same track. And the whole parliamentary district is there, including the Brandenburg gate, the Bundestag building, the parliamentary offices, the Victory monument and so many other things. I spent hours there, and still didn't absorb it all!

One issue that I have been meaning to comment on is the use of bikes. Bikes are very common in the cities where we've been. But the bikes themselves are often old clunkers (EDIT - did I say "old"?    No, many of them are quite new, but they are still "clunkers"), helmets aren't required and no-one wears lycra around the cities. So little old ladies and mature gentlemen are just as at home on a bike as anyone else. And speeds are (usually) sedate. Perhaps in return for this, bikes seem to be allowed everywhere, on footpaths, through pedestrian filled plazas, up the wrong way on one-way streets! I realise that no-one in Melbourne has made it compulsory to wear lycra, but if we really are to introduce a bike culture into our cities (as some would wish), then many of us would find it less intimidating if lycra (EDIT - and the associated requirements of performance bikes travelling at high speed) wasn't as prevalent in everyday use.

Today around the Zoologischer Garten area a number of the major streets were closed, and given over to bikes! Masses of bikes, many carrying green balloons. But all ridden at quite sedate speeds and no lycra to be seen. Pedestrians, however, tended to come off 2^nd best – it was very hard to cross the streets!

And for my “it can only happen in Germany” story: there was a ticket inspector on the train today (pretty casually dressed, but he had some sort of ID card and other people were showing him their tickets). But I got into trouble, there was something wrong with my ticket! Seems that seniors travel today was either free or at a discount rate, and I had a full fare ticket. I count myself lucky that I wasn't fined for paying too much for my ticket!