Berlin from a Balloon

It’s become a habit for me to find opportunities to view cities from above, even though sometimes the experience gives me momentary ‘jelly-legs.’ But up to now, it’s always been an observation platform on a tall building or tower, or a hill above a city.

But in Paris this summer I discovered that for a relatively modest fee I could go up in an observation platform suspended from a captive hot-air (well, not really hot-air—they’re actually filled with helium) balloon—except that when the day came, my last day in Paris, the balloon was earth-bound because of wind. Oh, well, I thought; maybe another year.

And then I arrived in Berlin, only to look up and see, in different colors and with a different advertising sponsor, a near-twin of my lost opportunity.

The Berlin balloon takes off from an open field almost dead-center in the city, a walkable distance from many landmarks, which also means they’re close by when you’re up and looking down.

A very thick (and hopefully very strong) steel cable visible in the first picture of this group is wound around a powerful winch installed in the ground. It’s connected by the couplings above to the balloon’s harness. Unwind it from the winch and the balloon goes up; after fifteen minutes, the cable is wound down again, and the balloon lands. It sounds simple and reassuring, but my ‘jelly-legs’ kicked in when we abruptly started up.

The observation platform is actually a ring, carefully protected with mesh screens, but wide enough to walk around to look in all directions. On board, just above, was our pilot; I’m not sure just what his role is other than to be a calm presence, because the controls for the winch are operated from below.

TV Tower at center, just behind Humboldt Forum; to its left the Berliner Dom.

Berliner Dom and Humboldt again, with matching towers of French and German churches at Gendarmenmarkt in foreground

Reichstag building with dome in foreground; main railroad station behind it

The Tempodrom, an event venue on the site of the old Anhalter station

Some of the more unusual views from the balloon were practically under it. The field it ‘flies’ from was right at the Berlin Wall, and several exhibits and pieces of the wall are nearby, as is the Topography of Terror museum about the Nazi era. In the 30-some years since the wall, it has somehow escaped development.

A large part of the immediate vicinity is taken up with a large and colorfully-painted collection of Trabants—the loved and hated East German car popularly called the Trabi.

Just to complete the sort of offbeat tackiness of the whole thing, the corner is home not only to a yellow Trabi on a pillar, but to a currywurst stand with an enormous sausage on the roof. Which reminded me it was time for lunch…