The next day of our stay in Berlin, we went to visit the cemetery where two famous Berliners are buried. It was located a bit outise the major tourist attractions. It was not even in the map we had. If it would not be because of the Lonely Planet guide of Berlin, we would not have known about it. Before we reached there, after taking some S-Bahns, we noticed one street with a funny name: Fehlerstraße. Roughly translated is: the street of the mistake.
We entered the cemetery and it took us few minutes to find the grave we were looking for: the Marlene Dietrich grave. Honestly, I was expecting a bigger and extravagant grave. But, as you can see above, what makes it different from the graves around is that is shiny and been take care of. You can also see a stone of the city of Berlin that states the grave as a monument of the city.
And just some meters away, it was the grave of the famous photographer Helmut Newton, who died just recently. Again, nothing extravagant or out of the ordinary. Except the stones from the city of Berlin. My wife told me that Newton was jewish and fled from Germany in the 40's. He might have been very young then I guess. He had Australian citizenship and was an amazing photographer.
Days later, we went to the recently opened museum of Helmut Newton and his work, around the Zoologischer Garten, where you can get to know more about his life and photos. And a great bookshop where I got some photo books for my collection. I did not take photos there as it was not allowed.
Before we left the cemetery, we saw some graves (around 100) that did not have any gravestone. Only something small stating names (sometimes only mentioned "unknown" instead of a name), and 3 dates. Normally you see two dates in a grave, when someone was born and when s/he died. In these case, the third was the year 1944. It was not hard to guess they were victims (Jewish probably) of the Second World War. It was rather sad and very touching.
We decided then to go back to downtown and take one of the buses that take you through Berlin and that are part of the city system and not only for tourists. These buses are the 100 and the 200. They take you from west to east Berlin and viceversa. Must of these buses are double deckers and if you are lucky enough you seat in the floor above and at the front and you have an incredible view of the city. We took the bus that passed nex to the Reichstag, German Parlament. Here is a small video:
As you can hear and surely guess, many tourists opt for the 100 or the 200 bus. As the Italians speaking in the background of the video.
For lunch we decided to try again a recommendation of the Lonely Planet Berlin guide: a Vietnamese restaurant called Manngo. The food was great. I found out that a "Poh" is a kind of a soup in Vietnam that you will certainly find in several Vietnamese restaurants. And it can be with chicken, beaf, tofu or only vegetables. I am sure there are more varieties and probaly the orginal Poh in Vietnam is even better or perhaps different. I went for a small with chicken and my wife for a big one with Tofu. Both very good.
I had then some Rolls (forgot the name, sorry about that) that were delicious. Inside they had mint leafs, which I did not really liked. But overall, a very good dish that I might look for here in Hamburg. But the best was the coffee.
I have read that Vietnam is one of the world's biggest producers of coffee. But I never thought of how different they could serve/drink coffee in Vietnam. I had an iced coffe, which was good and strong. But my wife had it warm and it look something like this:
It was amazingly good. I guess, and it is only a guess, it is a sort of italian machine like, but put directly over the cup. We even considered going back to the restaurant later only for the coffee.That's it for today's post about our trip to Berlin, come back later for the third part. I am going to Leipzig in three days. I will try to finish the posts about Berlin, because I will be away for some days.
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