Glienicker Brücke is the bridge that used to divide East and West. Yesterday we did a little excursion to this bridge. Here now are a few of the pictures I took yesterday with Peter on and near the bridge.
Well, I wrote this in Berlin on the 10th of October 2012. The wall surrounding West Berlin came down in November 1989. This is going to be 25 years ago this year!
This was posted by Berlioz in October 2012. In November 2014 it is going to be 25 years since the wall came down! And it is now more than 50 years since the wall had been built!
I remember this day in October 2012 when we went for an excursion to Glienicker Brücke and from there to the Cafe GARAGE DU PONT which is situated just across the bridge in Potsdam. We had a lovely coffee break there with cake and a bit of brandy. We felt really spoilt!
Yesterday my wife showed some travel fatigue and was saying it was time we would heading home to Australia again. I thought it was time for an outing. The city of Berlin is surrounded by beautiful forests, rivers and lakes like no other city.
The River Havel
Just take the electric train ( S-Bahn ) and or a bus and head out in any direction. We were heading West to Glienicker Brücke.
Glienicker Brücke forms the border between Berlin and the city of Potsdam and was formerly the border between the two power blocks during the Cold War. Here, as you may have seen in movies or documentaries prisoners or spies were exchanged between the super powers.
Glienicker Brücke as seen from former West-Berlin
The East-Germans called the bridge the “Bridge of Unity”. It was anything but.
We strolled across the bridge, made famous in the German film “Under the…
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When you walk back from Potsdam you are greeted by the Schinkel designed Chateau Glienicke. We did not visit it but could gleem a lot from the outside.
From all this we were tired. Soon our bus arrived and we took it back to Wannsee station.
After a quick train trip we were home again in our Tiergarten district and our multi story apartment building was greeting us through the autumn leaves.
Places like Sydney have developed over the years a great coffee culture. Not far from where Caroline and Matthew live there is this coffee shop, dine in and take away. Some time ago Matthew and Caroline took us there.
The bottle you see in this picture is not a beer bottle but they serve water in these bottles. As soon as you sit down at one of the tables, someone comes with glasses and a bottle of water. I think it is a law now in Sydney, that when you go to a shop for a cup of coffee, they have to provide free water for you with the coffee. In some places you have to serve yourself from the counter where you find some water in jugs as well as glasses. Other places prefer to serve you the water to your table.
One of the waiters noticed that I was taking picture. Very politely we were asked then would we like to have a picture taken of all four of us. Happily we agreed. Here is the picture:
Matthew and Caroline are lucky: Where they live in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney all the shops they need are within walking distance or easily to reach by public transport. There are still lots of small shops in their street. However property prices in Waverly are enormous. Naturally, the rent they have to pay for their two bedroom unit is a lot. However they like the area very much and don’t plan on moving to a cheaper area. Not needing a car they save quite a bit of money which can go towards the rent. In most cheaper places they would not be able to survive without a car.
I think it is as good as official that if you drink strong coffee or tea you ought to drink some water too. For these beverages, namely tea and coffee, are diuretic, meaning you lose water which you need to replace if you do not want to become dehydrated.
Isn’t it important to stay sufficiently hydrated, especially in hot weather? I believe that this is so. I always try to think of drinking sufficient water. There is another reason why I try to drink a lot of water, it has to do with my tendency to bruise easily. And this is one of the reasons I am used to taking a lot of vitamin C supplements. Some people warned me, if I take too many of these Vitamin C tablets, I can develop kidney stones. Well, I have not developed any yet. Amazingly, as long as I drink sufficient water, any surplus vitamin C gets flushed out! For instance, if I get lose stool, then I know I have taken more vitamin C than my body needs and I reduce the intake a little bit.
I have been taking Vitamin C supplements since my early twenties (I am 79 now). I believe what Linus Pauling, the nobel prize winner, found out about Vitamin C, is right. My observation is that some people do all right without any supplements. Others, like for instance aborigines, badly need them if they are deprived of their traditional food. Some berries, they used to have plenty of in the bush, are extremely high in vitamin C. These days our fruit is usually not consumed fresh from the tree but comes from long storage in cool-rooms and loses some Vitamin C very quickly. Some of the traditional food, that aborigines used to eat all the time, had excessive amounts of Vitamin C, much much more than for instance oranges fresh from the tree. So how can you keep up sufficient intake of this vitamin without supplements if you are not in a position to get your supply fresh from the tree?
The first month of this year, where has it gone? And where has the whole of last year gone? One thing is for sure: Each month I took quite a few pictures. Looking at the pictures that I collected over all these months, I cannot but remember what I did in every of these months.
Last Friday we played Scrabble again at my place. There are usually four of us. When one person cannot make it on a Friday, just three of us play. I happen to have a picture that I took nearly two months ago when we also played at my place.
Irene, in the right of the picture, is at present very upset because her husband died recently of a heart attack. She says during the day she keeps herself pretty busy. But then in the evening, when she is sitting down and Les does not sit in the easy chair opposite hers, then she always becomes very, very sad.
This picture was taken soon after we arrived. After a while a lot more people turned up, probably about eighty. Les had come from Hungary in the 1950s and he and Irene had been very popular with people from the Hungarian Club.
The temperature in our house is at present only about 30 degrees Celsius. But it feels rather sticky (humid) I to me. I do sweat quite a lot. This is why I keep drinking more and more water. The other day I mentioned to my friends that I believe that one should drink about two litres of water per day. One lady objected. She insisted that if you drink that much all the good stuff, that the body needs, gets flushed out! I then asked her whether it was not like this, that the poison needed to be flushed out. She still insisted that one should not drink that much water.
AuntyUta 