swimming leaves © Lilly Schwartz

Would you believe it? I left the house! OK, OK, I’m exaggerating. I also left the house the days before, but only to stock up on food. I didn’t want to stay out long in the cold when I felt slightly ill. However, on Thursday I was feeling a bit better and I decided to go for a long walk after my driving lesson. I planned to go to Schloss Bellevue since it’s not so far from here and it’s a part of the Tiergarten I didn’t know yet. To explain, the Tiergarten is a very big park around the Siegessäule, which also houses the zoo. I think I’ve so far not even seen half of it, although I’ve been there quite a few times.

In the end I walked about half the perimeter of the tall metal fence surrounding the grounds of Schloss Bellevue and still couldn’t even catch a glimpse of it from the side where I was approaching it. When I look at the map now I just would have had to follow the Spreeweg and would have probably seen it, but I was more interested in the park than in the building. This part of the Tiergarten is not as nice as the part around the new lake, but that’s probably because the perimeter fence of Schloss Bellevue is a bit intimidating with its height and the CCTV cameras everywhere. There is a small English garden, but it looked a bit rugged thanks to the approaching winter. It’s probably quite nice when you see it in summer. Now the pond just across a lawn from the the English garden is probably the prettiest sight around. Leaves from tall trees had fallen into the water and made for an interesting picture.

On the far corner of this part of the park you reached a small metal gate through which you could reach another small English garden style part. On the left side it had a statue of a young boy feeding a horse. There were a couple of benches on the right and another gate that led onto a clearing. This small clearing had an even more intimidating perimeter fence, concrete with barbwire, and there was a statue of a bull sitting under a tree. If it hadn’t been for the barbed wire and concrete it almost could have been taken out of an idyllic scene in a Heine short story that I vaguely remember reading years ago. I also don’t quite understand why there is the need for a massive concrete wall with barbed wire only for this little idyllic spot. It’s probably just there to make people feel out of place when they attempt to sit on one of the benches to read.