The next morning started at Alexanderplatz, under the Weltzeituhr, a rotating column of city names and clocks that has apparently been telling half the planet what time it is since long before either of us existed, a small crowd gathered around its base doing what crowds do at famous clocks, which is mostly just stand there. From there it was Brandenburg Gate, half wrapped in renovation scaffolding and somehow no less recognizable for it. I stood in the plaza in front of it for a minute doing something I had not expected to do, which was recognize a place I had never been to. Years of war games and movies had put this exact view in my head long before I earned it honestly, columns and all, and standing there in person felt less like discovery and more like confirming something I already knew from a screen.
The Jewish Museum took up most of the early afternoon, and I will not try to compress it into a paragraph here except to say it was the kind of experience that changes the shape of the rest of your day, quieter, slower, less interested in being photographed. I ducked into the Mall of Berlin afterward mostly to warm up, which felt like a strange gear shift and probably was one.
Berlin Cathedral anchored the rest of the day, its green dome and gold cross visible from most of the walk back toward the river, snow still dusted thin across the plaza in front of it despite scaffolding of its own climbing one side. A second Christmas market nearby sold hand painted glass ornaments, tiny snow covered villages and a very recognizable Brandenburg Gate rendered in miniature on the curve of a bauble, next to, for reasons no one explained to me, an ornament shaped like the Grinch.
I had seen this city a hundred times online before I got here, and it still managed to surprise me.
I came back to the Cathedral again after dark, on purpose this time, and stood in front of a puddle that had turned the whole lit up building into two of itself, one right side up and one folded into the ground.
