Here's what's so special about Berlin: Under gray armor skies, you decide to seek shelter on a sunless day.
Trouble is, you're standing in the middle of Potsdamerplatz, once the city's busiest intersection but today merely a dismal, garbage-strewn lot claimed by artists who have dragged old tanks and warplanes into the middle of the plaza and painted them pink. There aren't a whole lot of places to duckinto other than the MIGs. But, if you squint, you can see ... just there, a lone building, farther down the rutted road.
So you venture in, ignoring the cracked windows and barbed wire atop the courtyard fence. And what do you find inside this crumbling old edifice, in the middle of this decaying plaza, in this time of year in Berlin when the air is thick and sweet with coal smoke?
Elegant blue-haired ladies sip tea and tussle with slabs of Sunday cake, surrounded by opulent, baroque architecture. Young sophisticated Berliners listen to cool jazz, wrapping themselves around a gracefully curved Art Deco bar and ordering bottles of wine for 45 Deutsche marks (or about $30). They are immune, it seems, to the broken shards of war and communism scattered so casually about.
And that, you see, is what's special about Berlin. It is a place of constant surprise, layered meaning, head-spinning contrasts, where "expecting the unexpected" is not a cliche but salient travel advice. Surprise, ineffably, is part of the Berlin experience.
For there you are, poking through a wasteland of old tires, discarded refrigerators and metal scrap waste, when you stumble into a building with dancing putti and various other trappings of prewar splendor. Or you're walking past a facade of a building that looks like …
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