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Monday 9th June 2014

The hotel kindly grants us a late checkout time of 1 pm and this gives us plenty of time to check  a few more items off our Berlin Wish List, before our 5.25 pm flight to Sweden.

Breakfast is taken at a lovely small Backerei which we had spotted on our walk the previous day and following Liane’s advice we head off down Unter Den Linden to view, albeit only from the outside, the superb array of very impressive museums, theatres and the immense Berliner Dom. These are all concentrated around the Museumsinsel area and one can imagine what this great avenue will look like when the huge building and reconstruction works are completed. When taking a photo of the scene we could see 22 cranes on the skyline.

Rebuilding Berlin

Unter Den Linden, minus the cranes and excavations, has the potential to rank along such as the Champs Élysées and it’s a tragedy that this wonderful street was left hidden from the world of so long.

What has been striking about our visit to Berlin has been the realisation that almost all of the areas we have visited were previously in the GDR part of the city( with the notable exception of the Gedachtnis Kirche. )  However, what we now see is a magnificent city which will rank up there with the best in the world once the massive infrastructure projects have been completed.

The Air Berlin flight to Gothenburg is again fine and is made more memorable when a flight attendant approaches Gail to enquire whether we have ordered a hot meal. Gail says  “no” and the attendant asks “are you sure?”, to which Gail replies ” no”. The girl disappears for a short time and asks whether our name is Ireland and sure enough Gail had ordered the meals. In her defense this had been done some months earlier and a lot has happened since then.

We are becoming used to heavy landings on Air Berlin and the captain on this flight lives down to all expectations.

The long taxi ride into Gothenburg  costs 95 Aus$ but the driver is at least more cautious than the Schumacher clone we had had on a previous visit to Gothenburg in 2008.

Our long-time friend Stefan Thylin, welcomes us to his new apartment in a spectacular location overlooking the Gota River and he is looking very suntanned and well from a recent holiday on the Greek island of Kos.

Over some scrumptious strawberries we catch up on all the news and get off to bed at a reasonable time after a fairly tiring day.

Cheers

The Obese Ferret.