Barcomis Cafe in Berlin

 

Saturday 26 July 2008
The Barcomis Coffee Roasters and Cafe in Kreuzberg, Berlin that Matthias recommended. Wiedereröffnung in Kreuzberg: A fruit and vegetable shop's offerings on display in the foreground.
This was the first place from Matthias' list of must see places that we went for as we needed food.
The hotel had a computer so Jeantine did a Google map search and we headed off.
The day before we had a long wait at the Amsterdam Central Railway Station to get reserved seats for the train to Berlin. Jeantine was surprised as it had not been this busy for her before. But after a 2 hour wait with number allocation the lady behind the counter explained it was the summer school break and this was not unusual. So after going off for an ice cream and other wait distracting efforts we got our tickets.
Next day when we got onto the train we found we had backward facing seats, so Jeantine wandered to see if she could find non reserved forward facing seats. Which she did after a fashion – a few stops later people got on board to claim these seats so we headed back to what we thought were our seats. No, it was a matter of finding where the carriage number was before you looked for the seat numbers (repeated in each carriage). People around us kindly helped and finally we got to our seats to settle in to nibble our snacks and watch the countryside roll by. Unfortunately the air conditioning broke down and even though the guard had a go a number of times at restarting, we were starting to swelter and people were fanning themselves with bits of paper. Eventually, after changing crew at the German border, they brought on cold water to hand out to passengers. So hot and sweaty we were. Interesting countryside (I was last in Germany 45 years ago) and the main images seem to be cyclists peddling by on adjacent lanes, wheat and maize fields and every so often a cluster of wind generators.