Monday and Tuesday were two more productive work days for me. Monday night we walked to Parkstern, a really excellent little local restaurant. They seemed to be featuring ceps, a large European mushroom. We ordered a main course of beef with ceps, and a menu for one with pumpkin soup, pork ribs, pork shoulder with ceps, and a lovely dessert, splitting it all as usual. Tuesday night we joined our friends Lindsey and Kevin at Transit, a hip eatery in Mitte which was basically a tapas place, but pan-Asian. Then we walked to the Clarchens Ballhaus, which had sustained damage during WWII. The front half had become a courtyard; the lower floor of the back half was a fully restored ballroom / restaurant / bar, and it was Tango night, with many people of various ages and genders dancing. We had a drink there, and then peeked at the upper floor, where they feature other dances, and dance instruction. This room had been left pretty much the way it was. The GDR showed little interest either in tearing these places down or fixing them up.

The rest of the week I gradually accomplished less and less. Wednesday we arranged to meet Philipp and his friend Betty at Kimchi Princess, a hip Korean eatery, and decided to walk there for exercise and to see more details than we’d see on a bus or tram. There was a shoelace crisis, and all the time padding we’d made got used up shopping for new ones. The main courses were all really good, though there were only five side dishes and they were all brown.

As we had been walking around town, we kept seeing posters advertising various art shows, and at this point we had a list of things we wanted to see. Thursday we attacked the list, returning to Mitte to see a Cindy Sherman show at the Me Gallery. She invents all these characters, most of them ugly in some way, makes herself up to inhabit them, and then takes photographs. She’s the ultimate selfie artist. At the gallery there was a fantastic exhibit of various collected objets from all over the world and several centuries, displayed as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Around the corner there was a gallery showing Joel-Peter Witkin prints, always a lot of fun.

For the last several years, we have had our eyes out for parodies of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The mother of Ray’s college friend collected the former, and we’ve been continuing to look for them even though she’s sadly no longer around. A Stanford art professor emeritus collects the latter. One of the shows we’d noticed was “Botticelli Renaissance 2015-1445”, which was a show consisting entirely of works based on Botticelli (with many of his works as well) The Birth of Venus was the most often “referred to”. For us that was the can’t miss show of the year, and we spent the rest of the day there. We bought the 2 kg catalog to send home along with Sandro’s poster collage. After we saw the show, we sprinted through the permanent collection of Old Masters’ works.

We were on our own for dinner, and Google Maps recommended a Nigerian place not too far away. It must have recommended it to another group of Botticellians, since we were recognized when we arrived. It was delicious; there were many different sauces to have with ground yam (starch to be eaten with your fingers). We tasted our tablemates’ “bitter leaves” sauce, which turned out to be better than either of the things we actually ordered. Bitter leaves aren’t bitter. Next time. We returned to the studio and Thomas and Bibo were there, after a brief vacation on the North Sea after all the work preparing for the exhibition.

Friday we saw a few galleries we’d missed: a tiny show of Slavs and Tatars, and the “gay museum” (mostly showing time-based media). For dinner, Thomas took us to Schwarzwaldstuben, a Bavarian restaurant in Mitte, the third time that week we’d been on that two-block stretch of the same street. He’s apparently a regular there. It was quite good, especially the wild sausage. As we drove back he complained that “everyone in Mitte is young and good-looking. I hate it.”

On Saturday Lindsey and Kevin hosted a festive brunch at their amazing apartment with two large living rooms and a large dining room and a kitchen. I didn’t even see the bedroom. It rents for less than $1000 per month, and is in a great Kreuzberg neighborhood, not far from Tempelhof. Bibo drove us down there, quite a sacrifice on her part since she wouldn’t be able to drink mimosas. There were about 10 people there, besides us all thirtysomethings doing design or IT, mostly but not all US expats. Everyone had interesting stories and were fun to talk to. After six of the bubbly bottles had been consumed, we walked over to Victoria Park a block away, and learned what Kreuzberg meant: it’s a “berg”, a hill, located in this park, with a “kreuz”, a cross. At the top of the hill is a monument to the war that liberated Germany from Napoleon. The monument is like a church steeple with no church. Further down the hill is a larger wooden cross. The other two or three bubblies were gone by the time we returned. When we got back Ray and Bibo fixed a snack of the various vegetables in the refrigerator.

Sunday we’d arranged to spend with an old friend from college I hadn’t seen in about 40 years, who’d lived in the same big house on campus at Stanford. Bob and his wife Marion live in Potsdam, a city which was just outside the Berlin Wall. It has a large park with palaces that the court of Frederick the Great occupied; we toured them last year. This time we just visited Bob and Marion in their neighborhood Babelsberg, famous for having a large film studio. We walked around its a large park, with several little castles, next to a river, a scenic place to catch up on everything which has happened. Bob is a geologic researcher for the government, and Ray got to have yet another conversation about the chemistry of geology, in this case about tin deposits in Swaziland.

Early on Monday, Ray left for Romania. He’d packed up the poster collage the day before with other things we wanted to send back. Monday morning Thomas got out bubble wrap and cling film and tape, and did a super-good job wrapping it all up. Since he’d just taken his car in to get fixed (for some problem other than the fact that it is a deceitful diesel Volkswagen) he strapped the package onto his bike, and we rode to the DHL/Post office. They’d given us a quote for how much extra to pay for the 5cm of excessive width, but it turned out that only works for air freight. (Our gift of art thus became even more expensive.) We paid the fees, and sent it on its way. (The next step shown on the tracking site is “The shipment will arrive in the destination country.”)

Having enjoyed the little ride to the post office, I asked if it was OK to ride to have lunch with Philipp, about half an hour away. That was fine with Thomas, so I quickly learned most of the etiquette of riding bikes on Berlin streets, and how to recognize bike lanes. Philipp and I went for sushi so I’d still have room for a meal later in the day. After that, I was trying to decide where to go; Lindsey suggested Templehof, and that sounded perfect. Once I got there, it seemed a lot like Burning Man: a big flat space with people riding somewhat randomly on beater bikes. After awhile she met me for a drink: I ordered a rhubarb soda pop which I’d seen an empty bottle of earlier, it was delicious. We left just in time for me to get back before dark. After awhile, another SF ex-pat Quentin sent an email, and I found him and we had enormous burgers, and discussed the lives of Americans in Berlin.