The Berlin Blogs ~ Aug 26 – 31, 2010

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | No Comments »

En route between housesitting in Noordwijk, Holland, and accepting a writing fellowship in Białystok, Poland, I spent 4 very full days in Berlin. At first, while planning my trip, I was discouraged by the high hotel prices. Even vacation rentals were a fortune!

Then I discovered that the Netherlands’ high-speed train web site links to extensive hotel bookings, www.nshispeed.nl/en/train-promotions/last-minute-hotels . Read the rest of this entry »

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Unlike Vienna or Paris, Berlin doesn’t take itself too seriously. Berlin is still a kid on Christmas morning “gee whizzing” about its bountiful choices. The restaurants are still homey and unpretentious. The impressive and numerous museums are not overdone or overpriced. Most cost 8 Euros (about $10) and the tourism bureau offers a very reasonable Museum Card – all the museums you can squeeze into 3 consecutive days for 19 Euros (about $24). 60 museums, including the significant national museums, participate.

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310 Million Tits!

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | No Comments »

Author’s Note: This post’s title (taken from former US Sen. Alan Simpson’s pejorative quote about Social Security made earlier this week) has nothing to do with this blog, but when I first read the headline, I thought it was “310 million HITS” and I thought, “YE—AHH! I want 310 million hits!“ So, I’m shamelessly, uh, milking an out-of-touch Senator’s foolishness for my own benefit.

Speaking of milking, I took full advantage of my Berlin Museum Pass. Cost: € 19 for all the museums I could squeeze into 3 consecutive days. I hit: Read the rest of this entry »

Ich Bin Ein FAT Berliner

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | No Comments »

Dining in Berlin is al fresco in the hood I’m in (Kurfürstendamm – the Champs Élysées of Berlin lined with stores like Cartier, Yves Saint Laurent, Hermés, Valentino – all closed on Sundays). It’s been rainy, so all the restaurants here have heaters and shawls folded over the seats. My first night, I had an extraordinary dinner (lamb and eggplant in a tart yogurt sauce) at a Turkish restaurant (Baba Angora, www.BabaAngora.de). I loved it so much, I returned on my last night! (Teresa, try Angora red wine! She’s on her way to Turkey to read from her fabulous book Noah’s Wife. Treat yourself: www.tkthorne.com She just won ForeWord’s 2009 Historical Fiction Book-of-the-Year!)

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Sunrise ~ Sun, Aug 29

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | 1 Comment »

“Art brings the subconscious into the sunlight,” Henri Laurens, a Surrealist sculptor active during the beginning half of the last century wrote. I spent yesterday at the Alte Nationalgalerie, (www.smb.museum) the fabulous Neue Nationalgalerie (www.smb.museum) and today at the Brücke-Museum, (www.bruecke-museum.de) learning about the Dresden “bridge” artists who painted in the early 1900s. Influenced at first by Van Gogh and later by the French Fauvists, their work is startlingly colorful, more defined than the Impressionists who preceded them and less abstract than the Surrealists who follow them. Several of Die Brücke artists traveled to the South Pacific and painted “primitives” – native masks, native people in natural, unclothed settings – a real departure from the highly coiffed Impressionists and portraiturists of the time – and their work later caught Hitler’s eye.

Most of these artists’ work was confiscated by the Nazis and displayed in a 1937 exhibit in Munich called “Degenerative Art.” In all, the Nazis confiscated more than 20,000 works by more than 200 artists. Read the rest of this entry »

A Good Monday Political Tour in Berlin

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | No Comments »

• Mauermuseum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie (www.mauermuseum.de)is an exhausting, cramped tour of artifacts relating to the Wall (the Mauer), to its guards and to East Berliners who crossed it illegally. There is little historical or political context to the exhibits, so visit the informative display of murals on Zimmerstrasse, just outside and to the right of the museum. Displaying photos and history (in English, too), the large panels are the size of the Wall and run the Wall’s former course.

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Berlin: What I’d Have Done Differently

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | August 31st, 2010 | No Comments »

It’s hard to imagine that only 25 years ago, this city was cut in half. The scar has healed nearly completely and I wish in my wanderings I’d been more attuned to the former laceration to be able to notice the Wall’s vestiges.

Had I visited the Topography of Terror exhibition (www.topographie.de), Checkpoint Charlie and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (www.mauermuseum.de) before traipsing around the city, I would have had a deeper appreciation of Berlin and it’s not-so-distant history.

Tourist Tip-Off: Berliners don’t jaywalk. Even in the rain with no traffic in sight, they wait patiently for the little green Go-Man.

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Barely Breathing….

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | June 11th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

When working with refugees, one holds one’s breath.

Not like the way we did when we were kids, when we’d see how many times we could cross the pool without surfacing, deliberately pushing our lungs to their limits.

It’s more like you just forget to breathe for so long that a section of your diaphragm goes numb, until your breath is in a holding pattern not unlike the lives of the families you hope to help.

Yesterday, I learned an Iraqi I thought was dead is alive, married and living in Ithaca, NY.

Ithaca!

I had written about Dhia, the resourceful young man who worked at the coffee house across the street from my Baghdad hotel. Dhia, who befriended me and trusted me, before becoming a translator for the US Army, a potentially fatal job during the early months of the US occupation.

I wrote about how Dhia’s hair-curling coffee and candid conversation were a refuge for me from the tumult of Iraq’s pre-war jittery streets and about how I tried to find him after the war began.

I heard from him briefly via US Army e-mail in the fall of 2003, then never again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bitch and The Chow

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | March 25th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

[This an occassional post elucidating my life on the road this year as I criss-cross America, housesitting and petsitting, while I write my book and rent out my own home in Santa Monica.]

Next week, I was supposed to be dog/housesitting for Pixie, a chow-chow with separation anxiety so severe she once threw herself through a plate glass window. It did occur to me that watching this chow might be more than I could chew.

However, Cheryl, the owner, assured me in her syrupy voice that Pixie had been through extensive therapy and was doing better. Good. She could not, however, be left alone for more than a quick grocery run. Read the rest of this entry »

Refugee, American-Style

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | March 9th, 2009 | No Comments »

“I still have family who is scattered,” says Kirk Stevens over lunch at the iconic Little Dizzy’s in New Orleans, 3 ½ years after the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina blew his family throughout the South.

“My family is scattered,” said a 75-year-old woman in Amman, Jordan, half a world away, 5 years after the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq sent her family scrambling. Her husband died during the first Gulf War. Her 3 adult children fled to Sweden and Jordan, her youngest committed suicide. “I brought nothing (except) the death certificates for my husband and son.”

“Refugee” became a politically charged word to describe the displaced Louisianans and Mississippians strewn throughout the south. How could an American be a “refugee” in his or her own country? Yet, we don’t blink when we use the neutered term “internally displaced refugees” to describe the 2 million Iraqis who have been forced from their family homes but don’t have the funds or the desire to leave their home country.

Perhaps the image of lines of people carrying scant Read the rest of this entry »