Berlin Saturday

Saturday Feb 25

Today we went to the Pergamon Museum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Museum

However, before I get into that I want to describe silliness from Friday night. Surely no one will remember such silliness.

On the way to the hotel I stopped at an Apotheke to get some cough medicine. You must go to such a place in Europe, can’t get such things in a normal store. The is also true for such things as contact lens fluid and etc, etc. Anyway, what I got would be a prescription in the US. I was lucky to find one open and with such good English - and so I got the best one he had, or so he said, a kindly looking father of Pinocchio.

I got back to the room to take my first dose and realized I forgot to ask how much, how often, etc., and I needed an interpretation so I waddled down to our friendly night manager, Herr Weller, and he told me what the instructions said, front and back, literally, word for word In a few cases he learned English for the German and in a few cases I learned, well, uh er, let’s just repeat some of the good ones; he read the dosage for all ages, clearly I was not all ages – he read them anyway; he read the warnings for pg women, clearly I am not either, at least I hope. He reads the warning about bleeding and he can’t interpret into English a word, turns out it is phlegm. He tells me about not taking it more than every 6 hours, good and great; ditto for not drinking the whole bottle; good, good and then out of the clear he says

“do you experience erections”?

I look at him and say, I don’t know what you mean (I’m thinking, aiya, bareback Berlin, aiya

He has no clue what he has said and goes back to the sheet and stammers, “it is warning for erections – asking if you get erections”. So I gingerly ask, “this will give me erections?” Not sure at all if I want the answer! No, no, no, it is a safety warning if you experience erections! The is getting fun but alas I think I see his dilemma so I ask,

Could the word be rejection?

Ah, his face turns happy, do you have rejections? Yes, of course, yes, not erections, but rejections.

Nope, I say, no rejections and he says

“yes, yes, well, so, I’m glad we are over with the” and laughs.

I did not buy him a flower.

And, one final note, the Germans do NOT pamper their kinder – no lemon, no cherry, no anything – horrible, evil, vile, stuff!!!!

So we were up and walking to the UBahn at about 930 and it was about 12 with wind chill. We notice hardly anyone out and around for a Saturday morning. Of course, it is too cold, they are staying in their homes!

The Pergamon Museum is really really neat – especially the Ishtar Gate in Babylonia. I cite again the web site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Museum as it is well worth a glance. This was back in the days similar to Ephasus.

We left the museum and I’m now back in the room at 4pm. It never did get warm but wind mostly died away and the people finally came out, maybe around mid day. When we got to the museum there were maybe 25 of us; about an hour later it started to get crowded and by noon it was jammed.

Goodnight and sleep tight…..from Berlin, Auf Wiedersehen