the website of Mark S Bailen. . . writer, illustrator, and lousy photographer
We spent a week in Berlin where I learned the real reason the wall came down, Kentucky Fried Chicken! Apparently the Eastern Bloc couldn’t resist the colonel’s secret recipe. Finger Lecken Gut! Of course KFC can’t get all the credit for the downfall of communism. McDonald’s offers BIG MACS MIT CHEESE on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie.
I love little hidden urban green spaces, the wilder the better. And Berlin was full of these.
Here’s a lousy photo of a small section of the Tempelhof, an old airfield turned into an over-900 acre park. These dudes were playing a massive game of four-square.
Tour guide at the Brandenburg Gate talks about military states, forced occupation, and damage that can occur from bombing campaigns. Luckily we don’t have to worry about these problems today.
The fake sky at Charlottenburg Palace. Back in the day, the skies were much more intense, full of trumpeting cherubs, golden crowns, and epic battles. Our present-day skies need to up their game.
Here I am standing in a ridiculously ostentatious room in Charlottenburg Palace, one filled with cups, saucers, plates, and numerous other vessels? Displaying this stuff was a status symbol for Prussian royalty. Hordes of craftsmen built palace wings dedicated solely to ceramics. Maybe if the Prussians spent less time goofing with their tableware, they wouldn’t have been routed by Napoleon?
This room also reminded me of that old Carlin bit on stuff.
The statue of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (on the right), glumly looking up at the Victory Column, thinking why does fraulein get such a big column, while I get a little one? You can also see the bike I rented to tool around Berlin. Lovely bike lanes in this city!
Below’s another view of the two statues. . . . poor little Helmuth.
Bear discovers mini-monolith at the Berlin Zoo. . . Also some nice fake rocks, a mix of real stone and concrete.
The inside of the Empire of Cats at the Berlin Zoo had this modern concrete brutalist bunker feel, with spurious explosions of nature. This style shows up often in zoos. I was so mesmerized by the space, that I didn’t even look into the enclosures.
I’m sorry for this lousy photo, but this was by far my favorite exhibit at the Berlin Zoo. It was called Eagle Canyon and it was nothing remotely like a canyon (the tunnel is a tower?). It was a wonderfully messy fake mountain constructed out of real stones atop which mountain goats skirted dangerously on the edges of little cliffs. The critters were very active and I watched them for a long time. If you look close at the photo, you can see 4-5 of em. The exhibit also had a path over the mountain for humans to traverse with a fake little chalet and a place where the mountain goats crossed below. Eagle Canyon was tucked in the middle of the zoo and hardly anybody visited it, a hidden gem!