Bagels Sights And Shopping

Following a recommendation I found on the Internet, we started today by eating at Salomon Bagels in the shopping center at Potsdamer Platz.  Back home we’re both a fan of bagels, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a proper Jewish bagel (they are a traditional Jewish food) and I had read that Salomon Bagels was a good place to get a traditional-style bagel.  They were one of Berlin’s first bagel stores (I think it’s now a franchise chain with multiple locations) and the Potsdamer Platz location isn’t the original, but it was convenient for us because our sightseeing plans for today concentrated on this area.

I had wanted a chocolate bagel because the site which recommended Salomon’s had said that it’s their best flavour, but they were sold out of chocolate (and many other flavours!) so I got stuck with a sesame bagel with cream cheese.  To my surprise, Paul decided to get poppy seed with cream cheese – in our 9 years together I’ve never seen him order a poppy seed bagel, and we’ve had lots of bagels together!  When we sat down after ordering at the counter, we saw that there was a much bigger menu for dine-in (as opposed to take away), but our bagels showed up right away so it was too late to change our order.  While the bagels were good, we both wished we had known we could order a full breakfast (like eggs, ham, etc.) with a bagel because that would have suited our tastes more at almost the same price.

After a bit of time at Potsdamer Platz to look at the very modern commercial buildings (which reminded us of home), we crossed the street to find a small section of the Berlin wall with a bit of display information.  There was a guy dressed in a traditional army outfit sitting in front of the displays at a small table with a sign saying “Passport Stamps” and we curiously inquired about the stamps.  He told us that for 2 euros he can stamp our passport with the official East-Berlin Visa stamp, which Paul got very excited about.  We didn’t have our passports with us, so we asked if he would be around tomorrow, and decided we would come back to get our passports stamped.

However, when we continued on to Brandenburg Gate, a very well known former city gate of Berlin, we saw a few more guys sitting at tables with the same kind of signs, wearing the same kind of uniform, and we became suspicious about the validity of these passport stamps.  Paul decided to Google it on his blackberry, and we found out that the stamps are not in fact valid and it can actually invalidate your passport to have it stamped with a fake or invalid stamp!  It seems some people have gotten these stamps and not had a problem with having them on their passports when passing through customs, but we’re on the road for a while and we need our passports so better safe than sorry!  Thank God we didn’t actually have our passports on us today!

Next we headed over to the Reichstag building, the seat of the German Parliament.  It’s central glass rooftop dome is a top tourist attraction because it’s free to go up and provides great views of the city, but at any given time you have to wait in line for at least an hour to catch the lift up (and no, there aren’t stairs you can climb).  Since we didn’t have very much else planned, we waited in line, and after about an hour and a relatively stringent security check, we got to the top and our patience was rewarded with a truly great panoramic view of Berlin.  From the top of the dome you can see almost all the notable buildings in Berlin, including the Berliner Dom, the Rathaus, and Potsdamer Platz.  They also provide you with a free picture guide pamphlet which lists out all the buildings to take note of with a brief description of each, which I found quite handy.  This was definitely one of the nicest free activities we’ve done so far

We finished our day by walking down a boulevard called Unter derLinden (“under the lime trees”) because it was nearby (the boulevard’s western end starts at Brandenburg Gate).   It used to be one of the grandest boulevards in all of Europe before the war and according to Rick Steves it has come back to life, but we didn’t see anything really interesting while walking along.  I was, however, intrigued by some of the history behind this boulevard – during his reign, Hitler had the thousand linden trees that lined the boulevard removed and replaced with Nazi flags, but because of popular discontent he had the trees replanted.  It’s interesting to see that even Hitler could admit he made a mistake.

Before catching the subway back to our hotel, we veered off Unter der Linden to browse the shops on Friedrichstraße, a major culture and shopping street in Berlin.  The website that recommended Salomon Bagels had also recommended Friedrichstraße for “designer shopping bargains,” but all I saw were a bunch of full-priced luxury designer brand stores which didn’t seem like a bargain at all!  We ignored most of the stores that we passed but stopped and browsed at an indoor auto mall because Paul was drawn in by the Bugatti dealership at the front of the mall.  While the Bugatti dealership was the nicest in the mall, the rest of it wasn’t bad either and I actually enjoyed walking around and checking out the cars.  My conclusion about Friedrichstraße: don’t go here unless you’re prepared to pay full price for designer goods, but there’s a cool indoor auto mall if you want to go for a reason other than shopping.