Berlin, needless to say, is a big city and so not all of it is serious and intellectual. Some of it is weird and quirky and sometimes downright funny. The photos here will give you a taste of that side of the city.

Big Bad Bears

Calisthenic Bears

One day, we bumped into a circle of bears. Honestly, they were all arranged in a ring and each represented a different country. Someone had asked artists in each country to decorate a bear to show how they thought their own country should be viewed. Here you see the US and UK versions with some live support from citizens. We liked the Liberty Bear but thought the British effort rather unimaginative. We didn't find many that really tickled our fancy. As we got to know the city we found of course that the bears were everywhere. Witness the pair in the second picture. We ought to have known immediately because of course we had seen a similar project in Paris in 1999 when the art objects were lions rather than bears.

An Old Water Pump

Just Another Brick in the Wall

Berlin Remnants

It's hard to remember what made us notice the old piece of machinery shown in the photo above, but perhaps the engineer in the family first wondered aloud what it was. It didn't take us long to figure it out. We wonder if anyone uses the pump nowadays since we verified that it is still in working order.The strange creatures posing with the pump are Jan, of course, and our two friends from Switzerland, Yvonne and Sandro. We all met in the Copper Canyon area of northern Mexico and spent a very pleasant day together going out to see Sinforosa Canyon.

We spent a very cold couple of days showing Yvonne and Sandro the sights of Berlin including the little remnant of the wall shown in the other picture above. There are marks on the ground in places showing the placement of the wall, but there are very few actual pieces left. The one shown is very close to Potsdamer Platz, a glitzy new shopping area that has replaced the wasteland left by the demise of the DDR (East Germany) and that is sort of famous for its big circus-tent-like Sony Center.

The Harmonica Player

Jan's New Beau

Jan, in particular, is a fan of these man-on-the-street statues. There are several in New York City. One is not unlike the harmonica player, here, but its American counterpart is reading a newspaper. The military man, however, is of a different ilk. He stands outside the Köpenick town hall, a building that he illegally commandered in the 1920s.