(This is extra material from our trip to Germany because it is summertime and our trip was grand.)

The food was very inexpensive. That’s the first thing. We went to a few places where the bottled water — which you do pay for — costed as much as the food. The grocery store was pretty cheap too.

The second thing we learned while eating at A Magica, a pizza place, on the suggestion of a friend. Germans eat their pizza with fork and knives. All of them. Sometimes you have to use a fork. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. No shame in it. To see an entire restaurant doing it was a bit unnerving.

Nearby the pizza parlor was Gethsemane Church, built in 1893:

The architect here used both Romanesque Revivalism with round arch windows and neo-Brick Gothic with traceries and rib vaults in the construction. His work wasn’t damaged during World War II, and there is a plate commemorating the German resistance against the Nazi government. Like many churches, this one was a meeting place for East Germans opposed to that government. The statue in the foreground is the Benedictive Christ, previously stood at the former Church of Reconciliation. That church was destroyed by the East German government in 1985 to make more space for the Berlin Wall. Since reunification it has been a central locale of civil rights groups and peace movements.

Just down the street was a cool sign for a burger joint:

I wonder how they eat those.