Just four short days in Berlin. We stayed in our miniloft again — the exact same loft, we think — giving the stay a slightly anxious and compacted feeling of deja vu. I could never quite shake the feeling that we had to use our time efficiently, which was only made worse by the fact that I caught a cold on our second day. (Two glasses of riesling at the Bertolt Brecht house seemed to give the upper hand to illness.) It was a dizzying, drippy cold that sapped all my energy. I felt leaden. I can't remember the last time I felt so drained.

I wanted to see more of Kreuzberg and to actually go into a museum or two. Andrew wanted a second chance at the Bauhaus Arhiv, he said because he wanted to see the museum's collection and not a special exhibit like the one we saw last year. But I wondered if perhaps he didn't want to prove to himself and to people who worked there that he could visit and not make a mess of things. Regardless, he was triumphant on both counts.

Thursdays, the Neue Nationalgalerie is free and open until 10:00 pm. We arrived in the evening and the place was bustling with student groups and people stopping by on their way to shows or parties, judging by the fanciness of their dress. I'd worried that going to yet another museum devoted to modern art wouldn't be the best use of time. (Whose judgment had I co-opted?) But I love the modern period and I hadn't expected that the collection would consist almost entirely of German artists. (In the States, modern art collections always seem to be a grab bag of artists.) The flow of the gallery was chronological, so that you considered the pieces in the context of historical events of the time. Placards described the relationship of the works to political events and artistic movements and sometimes told how the works were confiscated or lost during the Nazi regime and eventually recovered — or not. For example, the Tower of the Blue Horses by Franz Marc, which the Nazis condemned as degenerate art only to steal for themselves, is still missing. I really enjoyed the collection of Otto Dix's work — beautiful people exuding a repulsiveness or disfigured veterans grotesque and half machine, and the carnage of the first world war unspared.

On a cold sprinkly day we walked around Kreuzberg, starting at the Turkish market and turning out into the neighborhood, walking north and east toward Friedrichshain. We stopped at Burgermeister for lunch, which was whimsical-seeming but very cold for having to sit outside. I cut my thumb opening a bottle, adding to an already down day what with being sick and chilled from being outside so long. We walked west from there through the gritty hipness to Kottbusser Tor station. We hopped the train west and a little south and popped up onto a quiet street that flanked a cemetery. The tranquility of that street is one of my favorite memories of walking around, even though I felt miserable. This area is still hip but upscale. I liked the quiet streets and old buildings. We stopped to warm up in the Marheineke Markthalle, resting for a long time. For dinner, we returned to Hasir, which we'd enjoyed so much last year. This time, for me, not so much. I'm not sure why — feeling crappy or too-high expectations. Maybe I just ordered the wrong thing.