Berlin (Part 1)

I arrived in Berlin yesterday afternoon and made a bee-line to the same excellent hotel I stayed in the last time I was here, the Brandenburger Hof. After freshening up over a drink with my NY friend Denise who flew in from Paris, we headed out to dinner at Hasir, a lively Turkish restaurant in the Mitte district.

The next day we walked around the heart of pre-war Berlin, stopping at the impressively restored facade of the Neue Synagoge on the Oranienburgerstraße (it was partially burned in the Reichskristallnacht in 1938; heavily damaged by allied bombing in 1945; and its posterior ruins mostly cleared thereafter) . We then cut over to Unter den Linden, the grand pre-war thoroughfare, and headed west to the Pariser Platz and adjacent Brandenburg Gate.

In the afternoon we walked around the  increasingly hipsterized Prenzlauer Berg district, where we had an unexpectedly fine late lunch in restaurant we stumbled on off the Schönhauser Allee called Mila-Canti. It billed itself as "Mediterranean-Creative", and our charming waiter, whom we thought was Italian, actually turned out to be Kurdish. In addition to two jumbo beers, we had a surprisingly tasty dish called Kartoffeln Auflauf:  chunks of sautéed chicken and potatoes in a lightly creamy white-wine sauce with some melted Edam cheese, bubbling in a gratin dish.

Tonight we are having dinner at Austria, a restaurant in the Kreuzberg district. I've been there before. It's decorated like an Austrian hunting lodge -- antlers and all -- and features organic meats and wines, with Kapsreiter and Zipfer on tap, and very good wienerschnitzel the size of a throw pillow.

Tomorrow we plan to visit some museums and, if the weather's clear, the Reichstag. Then back to Dresden, and Week 2 of classes...