After a day of history, our pattern of travel demanded a day of shopping and food. Unfortunately it was my turn for a dodgy knee, so I took back the knee brace and didn't let it stop me powering through a major Berlin shopping district.
Berlin's premier department store KaDeWe is on our bus route, so it was an easy journey to start our shopping day there. However we used the opportunity to combine our mission to eat as much cake as possible by heading straight up to the food floor. KaDeWe is what Harrods would be without the endless crushing crowds of tourists - an expensive refined department store with an amazing food floor that contains both things to buy and take away and also a series of "bars" serving everything from coffee and cake, to beer and sausage, cheese and port, champagne and oysters. We stopped off for a coffee and shared a slice of KaDeWe's own torte. It was delicious, quite reminiscent of a very good tiramisu, although S - always the perfectionist - would have liked the decorative chocolate slices to be a bit less sweet (he also ate the first one before I could take the photo).
We wandered down the street, really window shopping. It is just so interesting to compare prices and stock in different places. For lunch we shared the traditional Berlin street food "currywurst" with fries. I had been told this is a must have but it seemed to us to basically be a curried sausage, not that exciting.
We continued down the street till we ended up at the Erotik Museum. We decided that given we were there, we might as well take a look. After navigating the shop full of varying toys, videos and costumes we found the actual museum quite fascinating. It starts out about Beate Uhse, the woman who founded the world's first sex shop. She has such an interesting history, a pilot who flew a stolen German army plane out of East Germany with her 2 year old son and 2 wounded soldiers on board. She started by writing a pamphlet on contraception and ended up with a publicly listed company worth hundreds of millions.
Other than that it contained an amazing collection of various forms of erotic material from different cultures through the ages. Most gross and yet fascinating was the display of aphrodisiacs and performance enhancers including things like dried tiger penis, etc.
Suitably informed, we headed back up the street, stopping to buy me some more strawberries and raspberries (they are so cheap and good here, S thinks I may become a berry with the amount I'm eating) and headed back to the apartment. However before we headed home we stopped in to our local baker for a drink and slice of cake. It is just bliss to have such great bakeries etc so close.
Tonight I've got my knee up and resting, all set for another day in Berlin. We are eating in - dessert will be more of the delicious maple and walnut Movinpick icecream we found yesterday. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
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