Germany, Sunday

[lisa_goldstein]

I continue being fascinated by Cold War Berlin, and the next day we go to the Spy Museum.  It’s a lot of fun, and would be a great place to take kids.  The entrance ticket says “Burn After Using”; it lets you into one of a pair of doorways and only opens the second one after a delay of a few seconds, as if someone is scanning you or bringing your name up on a database.  (It’s a little claustrophobic, to tell the truth.)  There are displays showing famous spies and their histories, and codebreaking, and nifty gadgets, including a camera hidden inside a watch that dates from the early 1900s.  There’s an Enigma Machine, though they aren’t as rare as I’d thought; it turns out they made something like 40,000 of them.  The best exhibits are interactive, especially one where you have to use a wand to find five listening devices in five minutes.  No one I saw got all five; instead a disembodied voice said, “Time’s up, you’ve been captured.”



There’s a lot to see and we’re pretty tired, so we skip the laser maze, where you have to avoid laser beams to get to the stealable object at the end.