Rinse and soak 500 g rice as you would normally, till the water runs clear.
Put a little bit of oil in the bottom of the cooker.
Add the drained rice, salt and 800 ml water. Et voilà – the cooker does the rest.
Arrival. Spent a good part of the afternoon trying to find out what to do about my missing wallet which disappeared on the way from the airport to Bahnhof Zoo. Saw for the first time the less friendly and helpful side of Berlin that everybody talks about.
In the evening a self-indulgent dinner with two friends at Les Solistes by Pierre Gagnaire.
Köpenicker Strasse, Engelbecken, Am Lokdepot, Park am Gleisdreieck
Day 1 of a four-day course in basic photography by Tomàs Correa @Pentaprisma. Highly recommended. Every day we met at a café for about an hour’s theory and then went out to practise and ended up having our photos evaluated.
Afterwards some more walking around Berlin, a.o. to the pomposity that ís Karl-Marx-Allee.
Day 2 of the photography course – Tempelhofer Feld (one of my favourite places in Berlin).
Later a gallery walk (posted as an event on internations.org) in the Potsdamer Strasse area.
Galleries visited during the evening’s gallery walk: Aurel Scheibler, Esther Schipper, Barbara Wien, Plan B, Nolan Judin, Guido W. Baudach, Blain Southern, Arndt, Tanja Wagner, and Exile.
The photography course continued at Schöneberger Südgelände
Day four of photography course. Theory in Café Wahrhaft Nahrhaft, practice in RAW Gelände, an area which is soon to succumb to “development”.
Visit to Positions Berlin Art Fair.
Dinner in Tapas y Más.
ABC Art Fair. Dinner in Greek restaurant Mandragoras.
A meeting in a projektbau showroom in Stralau, and a walk around to see (again) if I might want to live on Halbinsel Stralau.
Berliner Liste Art Fair.
Dinner in Marinehaus Restaurant und Kneipe
66 cm x 82 cm. From the early 1950s.
Josef Petersen was the grandson of the Norwegian Poet Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven and I don’t know much about him, nor the painting, except it was first given to Mr and Mrs Harremoes, Lundtofte, Denmark, for the silver wedding, by Mr Carl Castenskjold. Mrs Harremoes then gave it to my mother, Marie Møller, f. Skovmand, when she moved to Buegården, Bagsværd, in 1984. Contact me if interested.
Water on three sides, so centrally located, such wasted opportunities. A lot of really nice flats built and being built, and very idyllic surroundings, but no character, no “personality”, not ONE café or restaurant or shop, apart from a small bakery. Not even any people to be seen, really, for that matter, despite the fact it was a Saturday and many people already live in the area.
Thomasiusstrasse, just north of Bellevue S-Bahn Station, is a very short stree, so judging by the number of Stolpersteine, it either housed a high concentration of Jewish residents, or one very zealous snitch:
Moving on:
The northernmost part of Köpenicker Straβe, starting from Heinrich-Heine Straβe U-Bahn Station, has received development funding till 2019. Here are some impressions from 2014 and 2015.
So central, so well-connected by public transport, so close to the Spree, such potential. In a few years’ time we won’t remember what it looked like.
Heinrich-Heine Straβe U-Bahn Station is one of the first stations in Berlin, and like many of them, designed by Alfred Grenander. It was one of the ‘Geisterbahnhöfe’ during the cold war and the main entrance levelled with the ground and covered up. I have not been able to find a photo of the main entrance as it looked originally.
South of Heinrich-Heine Straβe U-Bahn Station:
UPDATE: One day in July 2019, I came across a small ceremony, where the artist was laying down some Stolpersteine:
This very moving initiative by the artist Gunter Demnig to commemorate individuals and often entire families wiped out during the Holocaust – Stolpersteine can be found all over Berlin (over 5000), but also in other cities such as Cologne, Rome, …. Read about them here.: http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/. And read about them in this book: Stolpersteine in Berlin – 12 Kiezspaziergänge. I bought mine at Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus which, incidentally, in addition to being a huge bookshop including a large section of books in English, has an excellent selection of classical CDs and DVDs.
The app ‘Stolpersteine’ is a great help when walking around Berlin. As you will see below, I always stop and take a photo whenever I spot one or more of them.
Tierpark Berlin Friedrichsfelde is sadly overlooked, but well worth the short U-Bahn ride from Alexanderplatz. It is Europe’s biggest landscape zoo, and is more like a huge park with the animal enclosures spread over a large area. A lot of walking is involved, and for long stretches, it feels more like being in a forest than in a zoo. There are countless different plants, bushes and trees, a.o. many rhododendron. In recent years, it has become famous for its successful elephant breeding programme, and it is also one of the few zoos in Western Europe that houses herds of ungulates, including some rarely kept species such as Hungarian longhorn, muskoxen and takin.
The only downside, which could easily be rectified so I don’t know why that has not happened yet, is that it is incredibly badly signposted (in strategic places not at all), the map they give you at the entrance is useless, and getting lost is unavoidable. You therefore end up walking even longer than necessary, so wear your best walking shoes. The only useful map is posted just inside the entrance (but for some strange reason only seems to exist in that one copy), so it may be a good idea to take a photo of that one before starting out. Or remember to download one here prior to the visit.
Here are some photos from my latest visit:
Impressions from gallery walks on 1 and 2 May, and visit to Galerienhaus Lindenstrasse on 3 May
