Kladow

Kladow is a little village with the special beauty of those tourist-ridden places (even though I expect there may be hordes of day-trippers sitting in the Biergarten on nice summer days).

Once arrived, and especially on a day like last Friday - with the sky looking as if the end of the world was coming -  you might have the feeling you are right in the middle of nowhere. And forget you are still in Berlin.

The first mentions of Kladow date back to the 13th century, when it was a wends'* (western slavs) settlement.

Not much is left from those times, though.

 

The village church was built in the 14th century on the "Havelberg" (Havel mountain) but - according to the historical reports - its interiors reminded of the activities of Kladow's "lower side", those of fishermen and boaters.

In 1808 it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt without much attention to its distinctive character.

 

From the hill where the church stands, following a not too steep path that goes down, you'll walk past the Maisel's Biergarten: a very inviting spot, not so much for the food as for the view

In spite of a few raindrops, the fresh wind and some annoying wasps, we managed to have lunch outside and to lose our connection to go back, which gave us the time to take a stroll on the harbor promenade and go to the playground...("missing the boat" is not all that bad sometimes!)

By early afternoon we were still dry but decided it was better to take the F10**, which comes (regularly) every hour and connects Kladow to Wannsee

*Wends

**the ferry belongs to the BVG, Berlin public transportation system, and it's included in the AB ticket.

Kladow on a map
History of Kladow (in German)
History of Kladow from "Bildband über Kladow" (in German)

bERLIN

Berlin is a very fast city; maybe not so energetic like New York or dazzling as Tokyo; it's not as frenetic as Shanghai and certainly not as loud as  you might expect, but it is constantly changing (I like to think of it as a woman who changes her make-up or hairstyle very often): things happen very fast, people are always in a hurry. Still, they can find a lot of room to release the tension.

A short clip made by Giovanni Antico (and here some national pride is obvious) has been circulating on the web in the past months and it's a good example of what I mean.

I know that some of my friends haven't been to Berlin yet, so I post it as a sort of virtual trip....

I will have to quote from Julian Hoffmann's blog:

"Perhaps no other city has taken up as much imaginary space over the last century as Berlin. It is a city forever in flux, not in the gradual, accumulated ways of most urban spaces, but with sudden, violent reinventions. Berlin is a place without definition, occupying a landscape unmeasured. It shifts endlessly between memory and forgetting, between future and past; it encircles the span of dreams".