While the Kafka Project cooks up new angles of approach for the research in Poland, let's revisit some earlier points of interest, shall we? This will be fun, if you ever intend to visit, and one would fervently hope, spend some time in the fabulous city of Berlin. 

Getting around via BVG:  If you are moderately fit, the best way to navigate is to use the public transportation system, BVG, which is nothing less than brilliant. Our last Friday in Berlin, Byron and I went from our incredibly bizarre dinner experience at Unsicht-Bar Restaurant in the center of Mitte to our sleepy southern suburb in Kleinmachnow in about 45 minutes. Just before midnight, we left the dark restaurant (review to come) and traveled by tram to the U-bahn, changed to the S-bahn, where we'd left our bikes earlier that day, and then biked the two kilometers home from the Zelendorf Station. A taxi ride from roughly the same location took about the same time, but cost $60, six times as much. 

If you are staying more than a few days, go ahead, spring for a week-long pass. You can go anywhere and everywhere, and not worry about buying a ticket. It's a public transportation theme park with unlimited rides on buses, trams, streetcars, S-bahn and U-bahn trains. It's easy and fun even if you have absolutely no German language skills. Just ask Vernetta, my tap dance teacher and one of the Magical Mystery travelers. She was thrilled with her proficiency getting back from a shopping excursion at KaDeWe. 

You can't get lost in Berlin. Not really, not for very long. 

One chapter has closed and another begun. The Magical Mystery Literary Tour has ended. Our intrepid adventurers have all left Berlin. Some returned home, some continued on extended journeys to England, Spain, Poland, and within Germany. Many of them have stories to tell you, and I will be sharing them with you as the Kafka Project's research in Eastern Europe unfolds. In all, the tour was indeed magical. We had astoundingly beautiful weather, and although we were a most diverse group, we all got along very well. Good friendships were formed. It was such a good experience we may indeed do it again next year.

And now the Kafka Project has begun in earnest. The first step in the Kafka Project's Eastern European Research began with a meeting in Kleinmachnow, south of Berlin, in a bird and flower-filled garden on a quiet cobblestone street.

Byron and I are the guests in the home of the family of another of Kafka's loves, Grete Bloch. Eva Bloch Turner, and her husband Jack. The Turners keep a garden apartment in this lovely house built for Eva's grandfather in 1933. Until the reunification of Germany in 1989, this peaceful and quiet street lined with mansions and villas was in East Berlin, and only the best, highest-ranking Communists lived here.