We went on an all-day bike tour of Berlin today. The focus of the tour was cold war/Berlin wall history. Unfortunately the tour guide wasn’t the greatest public speaker. He clearly knew his German history, and knew a lot about herding 25 hapless tourists on wobbly bicycles safely through Berlin traffic. But his info spiels were too short, with ill-timed dramatic pauses and a special gift for killing the punchline in a speech that was clearly crafted by someone else. On the other hand, it was lovely riding around town on a beach cruiser bicycle in the sunshine, and getting to know the other people on our tour.* And with bikes we did get to see a lot of the city, including the East Side Gallery, which are commissioned murals painted all over the longest remaining stretch of the wall. B pointed out that probably I was looking for the 200-level course on German cold war history, and the tour is strictly a survey course. I guess I should just read books on the topic now. German history buffs, suggestions?

We were thoroughly sun-baked by the end of the tour. We wandered down a quiet side street that Wabes promised contained both a puppet workshop and the oldest bakery in Berlin. Both, alas, were closed. But we did find a shady garden in which to pass beer o’clock. Then home to shower off the layers of sunscreen and grit, and a late afternoon nap. (Seriously, yes, I know how indulgent this schedule is).

Then we headed downstairs to the Mallorcan tapas cafe next door to our apartment, where we ended up having one of the best meals of our entire trip. A menu in both spanish and german gave us the opportunity to leverage both my high school spanish and ben’s high school german when it came to food words. Also, the impeccable english spoken by the cafe owner helped, too. But it was definitely the first time I’ve ordered dinner using 3 languages in the same sentence. (“We’ll have zwei Gläser Hauswein, las gambas, las patatas, y gazpacho, bitte”). Prawns cooked in oil and garlic, bacon-wrapped dates, gazpacho, potato gratin, bread with aioli, house red wine from Mallorca, flan and coffee to finish**. With the bill came a taste of a spanish digestif called Hierbas Ibicencas – a sort of aniseed-flavored rum.

We completed the evening with a stroll around our neighborhood. On every corrner there’s a sidewalk cafe with candles flickering on the tables and a few people lingering over a glass of wine and a cigarette. The park is full of picnickers canoodling on blankets under a nearly full moon. It’s still very warm at 10pm. We sleep with the windows and french doors thrown wide open to the night breezes. There’s only 8 hours between sunset and sunrise in Berlin in July, making for lingering twilights (and early dawns, not that we’ve been up to see any since leaving Austria.) The sidewalk cafe is such a defining feature of the Berlin landscape that it’s weird to realize that, like Chicago, fully half of the year it’s too cold for sidewalk cafes and picnics. It seems like the longer and colder winter is in a given place, the better that place lives up summer. Maybe that formula works on longer-term scales, too. Berlin had it pretty rough for most of the 20th century – maybe this century can be Berlin’s long, lingering summer.

*Winner: the totally ripped, tattooed guy in a superman t-shirt who turned out to be a retired Norwegian border guard (the Russian/Norwegian border, that is) who now works as a smoke jumper. Cause, well, dang.

** These were all small-plate size dishes, befre you start thinking we are unbelievable gluttons. We’re just your run-of-the-mill size gluttons.