The Zoo

June 9, 2025

Today was a national holiday in Germany, celebrating the Pentacost. Holidays here mean that no stores are open. Sundays mean the same, so for this Sunday-followed-by-a-holiday, people had to stock up on supplies ahead of time. Ezra went to shop Saturday evening, and found a lot of empty — really empty! — shelves in the supermarket. He managed to make a really delicious vegetable melange for dinner last night, though.

After a bit of “what shall we do” back and forth, we decided today would be a good day to go to the zoo. The Tiergarten in Berlin (“tier” means “animal” and the “garten" part is obvious) is pretty amazing, but I’ve been there twice before, and the kids were curious about the other zoo, the Tierpark, where they'd never been. A two-zoo city is explained by the fact that the city was split in two for some decades. The Tiergarten was West Berlin’s zoo, and the Tierpark was East Berlin’s. 

Getting there meant taking a number of S-Bahn (the mostly above-ground train) and the U-Bahn (the mostly underground train) and a bunch of walking in between. At least, I think we took both the S and the U, but it was all so convoluted, I may have lost track. You can get from anywhere in Berlin to anywhere else in Berlin using the fantastic public system of trains, buses, and trams, but it takes at least a Bachelor of Getting Around to figure out how to navigate it. 

One of the S-Bahn stations

Walking

Sandwiches at a bakery. Note reasonable prices (€1 is worth about $1.50 Canadian)

The zoo itself, as its name might suggest, was more park than animals, a forested area covering 160 hectares (400 acres.) We did a lot of walking! Aside from a few of the animals you’d expect at a zoo, like monkeys and tigers and bears and giraffes, it seemed that most of the animals were deer-like creatures I’d never heard of, or cow-like creatures I’d never heard of. We bee-lined to the polar bears (yes, pretty sad), wandered through some educational rainforest displays, and then climbed up a hill to the Himalaya section, which housed, among other fauna, a pair snow leopards. Like most of the other big cats at the zoo, the snow leopard we saw was asleep. I dunno, bored? Probably.

 

I think the girls preferred the sculptures of animals to the animals themselves.

 

 

 

Some sort of cattle

Cheetah

Snow Leopard

An aside: I don't know how they made that hill. There are no natural hills in Berlin. The only other Berlin hill that I know of is Teufelsberg, which was made from the rubble that was the city at the end of WWII. 

I’m conflicted about zoos, but as public opinion has turned to concerns about animal welfare, zoos have repositioned themselves as bastions of conservation, breeding and protecting endangered species. I don’t know if it’s enough to counter the more obvious purpose of entertaining homo sapiens, but it’s a step in the right direction. Even so, I’m not sure the big cats would agree.

We spent hours at the Tierpark, including  having a bit of a picnic there. The girls were on scooters, when the adults weren’t carrying the scooters. What was amazing was that I didn’t hear a word of complaint the whole day, about 8 hours from the time we left home till the time we were back in the neighbourhood for our dinner out. The kids covered the same ground we did, some 10 km of walking, and just trotted (or scooted) along happily. It’s a walking culture here; maybe that explains the lack of complaining. But I was impressed.

Back in the home turf, we went for dinner across the street from the apartment, at the Perla Jonica Trattoria. I have to go there for their pasta with fresh truffles, every time I visit, . The pasta is house made, rolled in a huge round of Parmesan which they set aflame with some sort of alcohol, then covered in shaved truffle. Man, I could go for it again before I leave Berlin!

After dinner, we all rolled in to the apartment (well, climbed the six flights of stairs), where Katharina and Ezra made the last preparation for Brookie's time at camp for the next three days. One of their traditions is to send along kisses, I mean actual kisses planted on pieces of paper. 

 

And with that, a good night.