California's Gold Country, November 27, 2010

On our way to the Sierra, Noam and I have often quickly glanced left and right while whizzing through gold country in the Sierra foothills and thought it might be a nice place to visit (sometime when we weren't in a hurry to get somewhere in the mountains). The weekend after Thanksgiving we dedicated to gold country. The plan was to start in Coulterville and to drive along highway 49 (get it? Highway 49! Like the 49ers! Who came to mine gold! Personally, I drove across it about 400 times before I made the connection) to Placerville, stopping for the night somewhere in the middle. Now that the miners are gone, it is clear that the gold country towns live and die by tourism. The main drag to Yosemite no longer runs through Coulterville and there is no ski hill nearby, so Coulterville is a sleepy place. This adobe building was the Sun Sun Wo mercantile, a chinese grocery and probably opium den that operated from 1851 to 1926 on Chinatown Main Street in Coulterville:
The Hotel Jeffery in Coulterville, with its cool stamped tin siding and second story porch, operated until recently as a hotel and restaurant:

North of Coulterville we stopped in Chinese Camp to confirm what I have long suspected from driving through it on the way to Yosemite - there is nothing there. We tried to hike around Jamestown but it was raining and miserably cold, so from Sonora we headed to Columbia State Historic Park. The town of Columbia has a history similar to that of many gold country towns: founded in 1850, swelled to accommodate people mining nearby, burned several times, then declined as the gold rush wound down. Columbia is unique in that in 1945, the state of California bought the main street and several side streets, including the remaining buildings. There are several businesses on main street including a couple of hotels, restaurants, and shops, and people dressed in period costume doing demonstrations like blacksmithing and candle making. The Columbia jail:

After Columbia we headed to the Moaning Cavern of Calaveras County. Dripping water used to cause a moaning sound at the entrance to the 410 foot deep cave. We took a walking tour of the cave down to 165 feet below ground, a depth reached by a sketchy looking spiral staircase built in 1922 and at the time, the tallest arc-welded structure. One website I found calls this type of cave feature "cave bacon":

After the cave, we went to the town of Murphys to find food. Murphys has a super cute main street that is littered with wineries. We stopped at a bookstore so I could buy a book including Mark Twain's story about the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, set in the town of Angel's Camp, where we would stay. At the bookstore, we asked for a restaurant recommendation and the proprietor and her friend recommended Mineral, a vegetarian restaurant across the street, or Grounds. We chose Grounds, where I ate a crab cake that nearly killed me. I spent 11:30 PM to 5:30 AM barfing every 35 minutes at the Gold Country Inn in Angel's Camp. Oh, it was horrible! Noam thinks Jesus punished us for choosing Grounds when there was a perfectly awesome haute vegetarian restaurant available. He thinks the punishment being meted out to me alone was a question of jurisdiction. I felt so awful the next day we just drove home rather than continuing our drive north, so stay tuned for Gold Country 2: Electric Boogaloo! Not sure when that will happen, because the thought of going back makes me seriously queazy, but you will be happy to know that Le Petit Bistro in Mountain View has since rehabilitated my relationship with crab cakes!

Berlin, October 28 - November 3, 2010

We arrived in Berlin and took a taxi to Pankow, a nondescript residential neighborhood in former East Berlin, where we settled in to Shalev's studio. Thanks Shalev! The next morning, we had breakfast at the bakery next door, where the baker listed to our orders spoken in ratty German sounded out from the labels in front of each type of pastry, corrected our pronunciation, then insisted on hearing our corrected pronunciation before turning over the pastries. After some most excellent rhubarb pastries, we headed downtown. We heard so many horror stories about not validating one's S- or U-bahn tickets, it seemed appropriate to commemorate the act:

We took the S-bahn to the Brandenburg Gate, a former city gate and symbol of Berlin:

Pretzel and sausages, the cuisine of my people. Great shot of every single tooth in my lower jaw, no?

The real purpose of our trip to Germany:

The Reichstag, which was famously set on fire in 1933 by a Dutch communist. After the fire, Hitler persuaded President Hindenberg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and which the Nazis used to ban publications that were not friendly to the Nazi cause. Pretty much the beginning of the Nazi era of Germans-behaving-badly. The Reichstag was reconstructed beginning in 1990 and reopened in 1999 as the meeting place of the Bundestag, the German parliament:

Remember how one of the iconic images of the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall was the East German Trabants driving on the Autobahn? Now you can drive them through Berlin on a Trabi-Safari. Alison, who is too young to remember the fall of the Berlin wall, could not understand why Hannah and I got all nostalgic at the site of crappy cars with blue clouds of oil smoke coming out the tail pipes. Trabi-safari:

On Friday Ronni took the train to Berlin from Cologne. We met her at the train station and went with her to Kreuzberg. (Later in the trip I went with her to this cute bar in Kreuzberg with the fox tail with binoculars:)

We stopped for pizza in Kreuzberg, where there was a picture of the funny and bossy guy behind counter with a Hitler mustache penciled in and the words "Pizza Nazi" written across the top. I didn't know you could call people "____ Nazi" in Germany, but I guess Seinfeld desensitized us all to that. Here are some helpful directions:

The River Spree:

Saturday Ronni met us in Prenzlauer Berg, where we walked around, shopped, had a cup of coffee, and tried to avoid disturbing the radishes:

Sunday I met Ronni for the exhibit at the German Historical Museum called "Hitler and the Germans." We spent a few minutes being annoyed by the exhibit, then left and cruised around museum island. This is what is known in my house as a Noamage, an homage to Noam - Noam loves him some photos that juxtapose old and new:

Sunday evening we walked through the Topography of Terror, a history of scary things Nazis did, located at the site of the Nazi security apparatus. We were relieved to note that the German treatment of this material is pretty similar to Yad Vashem's treatment (the national holocaust memorial in Israel). This is a picture from the Topography of Terror, *shudder*:

Actually the creepiest thing we saw was a picture from the 1960s of a Waffen SS reunion. Monday Alison and I headed out to Charlottenburg, home of Charlottenburg Palace, a palace built in the 17th century by the wife of Frederick I, the first king of Prussia. Charlottenburg Palace is the only royal residence in Berlin. Pretty neighborhood:

On our last day, I dragged Alison out to the suburb of Wannsee to see the Wannsee villa, where Hitler's lieutenants agreed on the final solution of the "Jewish question." The villa is on a street along the lake crammed with huge mansions. The villa was owned by the Nazi party and used by party higher ups for R and R. Disturbing to think of the premeditation, that the final solution was discussed not in a bunker but at a business meeting in this beautiful place - I can imagine some SS Gruppenfuhrer saying to his secretary "Lena, cancel my eleven o'clock, I have to schlep out to Wannsee for this meeting" (okay, maybe he didn't say schlep). The view from the Wannsee villa conference room:

I finally ate currywurst at the Wannsee train station, pretty much sausages with barbeque sauce. On our last evening, Alison and I waited in line to go inside the Reichstag. I am glad we bothered to do that, since shortly after we returned, I read that the Reichstag is now closed indefinitely to visitors due to security concerns. This is from near the top of the glass globe on the top, looking down into the chamber:

Thursday morning, we dropped the keys with the baker next door at 5 AM and took a taxi back to the airport. Bye Berlin!