A Work In Progress

I tripped back up to Prenzlauer for some breakfast, a little less successful this time. My two favourite cafes didn’t open until midday so I had to settle for one round the corner. Most of the museums are closed here in Berlin on Mondays, and since the weather opened up in the morning I decided to take a stroll through the Tiergarten, the huge tract of parkland west of the Brandenburg Gate.
Part of the way from Prenzlauer to Zoo stations was on the S-Bahn, the German equivalent of London’s ‘overland’ but is practically the same as the underground. Travelling east to west, across the river, the museum island and buildings north of Unter Den Linden, it’s another good aerial viewpoint of the city, a moving platform from which to observe a work in progress.
I came up to the Victoria statue atop the pedestal at Groser Stern and was impressed at the fact that it was bigger than I expected, probably due to the fact that it was bigger than the one I saw in Munich about a month ago. This Berlin one must be at least ten metres high, and one can walk right up the pedestal to its base. Taking a couple of grey landscape pics, wanting to beat the ensuing rush back down a tiny spiral staircase, I legged it over to the nearby café for a Schofferhoffer, a Wiener Schnitzel and a read of my current book, Hemingways ‘A Moveable Feast’, no mean feat itself sitting in front of six lanes of traffic with more than the occasional rain droplet leaking through the tree above.