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| Looking toward Potsdamer Platz |
Today, the marathon started at 8:30 am, and by late morning, when we started off, it was in full swing. It used to be that our travels caused volcanoes in Iceland to erupt and the euro to rise against the dollar, but in Germany, we seem to attract major events. In Hamburg, it was a heavy metal concert and the Schlepperballet (Google it!). Here in Berlin, it was the marathon and the Pope.
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| Gemaldegalerie |
So, we gave up trying to make it all the way in town to Museum Island; instead, we went only to the Gemaldegalerie, billed as the country's “premier art museum.” It's in a modern building with a splendid central hall that's devoid of pictures—a quiet, serene place off which you can choose your poison: art galleries featuring German, Dutch, French, English, Italian and other “schools,” all arranged chronologically. 
The museum boasts of some fifteen Rembrandts, though many were not up to snuff. One that caught our eye was a self-portrait when he was a young, cocky artist just setting out on his illustrious career—a vast change from the care-worn self-portraits he painted toward the end of his life.
There were also Vermeer's The Glass of Wine and Woman with a Pearl Necklace, some Raphaels and Titians, and lots of Gainsboroughs, but the one painting that caught our eye was Caraveggio's famous Cupid Victorious, which shows his lusty street-urchin model trampling out the armaments of war while holding a handful of love-arrows ready to shoot at the viewer.
Bob, of course, turned up lots of St. Sebastians. It's a standing joke that he seems to attract them in every major museum we go to. (“Not another human pin-cushion!”) The Gemaldegalerie is certainly a major museum, but not in the same tier as the Hermitage, National Gallery, Prado, Uffizi, or Metropolitian. On the other hand, the fact that so many of the country's treasurers survived the war is nothing short of miraculous.
On the way to the museum, we shared a train ride with a Norwegian runner. We asked if she was getting a headstart.
“No,” she replied, “I got lost.”
By now, Bob and our native tongue talker are old hands at the Berlin transportation system, so we were never lost, but we did make a short day of it. We were all in need of more down time.
