Unlike our dear former president, I inhaled. And while I did so intentionally and without apology, I also did so, as I do many things in life, with some degree of discomfort. Please, stay with me a moment. I promise I am not stoned as I write these words.

Obliged by journalistic duty to explore one of the reasons that some travelers visit Amsterdam, I set out one afternoon in search of a coffee house. Not the type of establishment where you buy coffee (wink, wink), but the type where you can “Bogart” a joint. Chalk it up to curiosity.

My quest, however, was not without a couple of false starts. The barista at the first coffee shop I walked into gave me a puzzled look, when I cowered up to the counter and asked for marijuana.

I half expected a SWAT team to descend on me after I had intoned the words. “I’m sorry,” she replied. “This is not the kind of coffee shop you’re looking for.” I gathered my composure and said brightly, “Then, I’ll just have a cappuccino.” I was somewhat relieved of the worry of guns pointed on me while I was handcuffed and hauled away.

Caffeinated, not stoned, I continued my quest, and I was soon to be rewarded. Not far from Amsterdam’s red light district was my Shangri-La. I knew well that the leaf emblazoned on the window was not basil or cilantro or parsley. That leaf, I recognized, was the holy grail of my quest.

Crossing the threshold of the establishment sheepishly, I walked up to the counter and eyed the clerk behind the counter with a conspiratorial look. “Marijuana,” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “What type of seed would you like?” Eureka! “Whatever you recommend,” I said, with a bring-it-on look. He reached under the counter and returned with, well, seeds.

“How do you smoke it,” I asked, dazed and confused. “Well, you have to grow it first,” he replied, explaining that I had stumbled into a seed shop. He had no license for consumption on premises.

Happily, he informed me that I could go to the Bulldog Cafe for what I was seeking. And boy was he right. The moment I opened the door to the Bulldog, I knew I had hit the jackpot. The air was thick with smoke, and everyone appeared carefree and happy. For a moment, I thought I saw Jimmy Hendrix through the purple haze.

At the counter, I was presented a menu. There were two columns of weed, categorized, as the clerk explained, from mild to heavy. Seeing all this intimidated me a bit, and then something happened. I am not sure if it was the vision of the SWAT team, my Southern Baptist upbringing, or Jimmy Hendrix in the corner, but I lost my courage. “Thank you,” I replied. “Just looking.” And I turned on my heel to leave.

It took an eternity to reach the front door. The smoke was so thick that I could have cut it with a knife. The aroma was pleasant, and I began to enjoy it as I continued the long, long walk to the front door.

People were smiling at me. I smiled back. I thought I heard Hendrix ask if he might be excused to kiss the sky.

I finally reached the front door, but before exiting, I turned to take in the happy scene of people legally toking. And then I did something that I had wanted to do from the beginning. I took a long and deep breath. I inhaled.

Over lunch at Berlin’s trendy Restaurant Diekmann at Weinhaus Huth, Nicole Röbel tells a story that grandparents might tell their grandchildren.

“We had no phone when I was a child,” she says, after finishing a bite of her Nicoise salad. She speaks of a childhood characterized by deprivation, with small rewards only on special occasions. When she performed well on her report card, for example, her parents sometimes took her to a special bakery, Intershop. It was an exceptionally rare extravagance. Smiling, she says, “I still remember the smell of the shop and the fresh-baked goods.”What makes Nicole’s story unique, however, is that she is only 28. She lived the first nine years of her life on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, shut off to the Western world and all that it promised. The Western world’s books, magazines and newspapers were practically non-existent in her home. Television offered only two channels.

And even when the televisions were rigged to receive signals from neighboring West Berlin, Nicole and her family had to be careful. Watching Western television shows was a violation against the laws of the German Democratic Republic, which allowed only GDR-produced television shows. “When we watched Western TV, it was with our curtains closed,” Nicole says.

“Once, when I was in the second grade, my parents let me watch Dumbo,” she says. “The next morning, all of the kids at school were tired and sleepy. My teacher turned furiously red and said, ‘I know what you did last night,’ but she could not say anything, and no one could confess or even talk about it.”

When the Wall fell, a whole new world opened to Nicole. “It’s interesting for me to think about how my life would have been had the wall remained,” she says. “I talk with friends about it. I would have never had a chance to travel. I would not have attended university. I would have left school at age 16 and taken whatever job the GDR gave me.”

At school, old ideas gave way to new ones. “The things we had learned up until then were not true anymore,” NIcole says. “Nearly every subject changed for us,” shifting from the Soviet to the Western perspective.

“I was the first generation who could choose which language we would study in school,” Nicole says. “Under the GDR, it was only Russian. But no one chose Russian after reunification. We all chose French and English. My French teacher, who came from East Berlin and had never had French lessons herself, learned along with us. We were turning pages in the book, learning together.”

Her parents struggled to adapt to the new world. Consider the difficulty they had getting a job when the wall fell. They were in their 40s with skills decades behind the West. Nicole’s mother had worked as a secretary, still typing on a manual typewriter. She had to adapt to the computer age. Her parents eventually upgraded their skills and got work.

I was fortunate to have an hourlong lunch with Nicole and snap her photo by a slab of the Wall that stands now only as a tourist attraction. In the photo, she looks much too young to have lived through a history that now seems so distant. But that’s just the thing about Berlin. History is assertively present.

2009 marks two decades since Germany’s reunification. The year was 1989, and the decades up until that year were lived in a Cold War between the eastern and western worlds. Here, a girl a little more than half my age, was telling me of a life difficult to imagine.

Nicole and I walked through from the restaurant through Tiergarten (the city park) to Brandenburg Gate. To a nine-year-old girl growing up in East Berlin, the imposing structure had served as a barrier to the mysterious and intriguing world beyond. For 28-year-old Nicole, however, the gate stands not as a symbol of an isolated past. Rather it represents an open invitation to a world moving forward.

How do you experience the real Berlin? Nicole Röbel (pictured), who represents Berlin’s official tourism department, lists five things visitors must do to say they’ve truly been to Berlin.

1. Try the currywurst. What is it? Sausage and sauce. No one knows for sure how it originated, but it consists of curry powder and ketchup and a big slab of sausage. You’ll find currywurst anywhere and everywhere, but at Ku’damn 195, situated appropriately at Kufurstendamm 195, you can order your currywurst with champagne. Splurge with a bottle of Dom Perignon (from 180 euros to 330 euros) or economize with a glass of Sekt, the German sparkling wine, for only a few euros.
2. Stroll Unter den Linden, the renowned tree-lined boulevard between Brandenburg Gate and Museum Island.
3. Visit Kreuzberg: Situated in former East Berlin, Kreuzberg is the largest Turkish community outside of Turkey. You’ll find lots of good markets as well as inexpensive, ethnic restaurants along Kottbusserdamm, but don’t miss the food market, held along the banks of the Maybachufer Canal, on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. “It bubbles with life,” Nicole says, “and good food.”
4. Straddle a saddle. “There’s no better way to experience Berlin than on a bicycle,” Nicole says. The city has dedicated bike roads and bike lanes, and car traffic is bike-aware, so you needn’t worry about being clobbered by vehicles. Best to start with a guided tour to get yourself oriented. One recommendation: Berlin On Bike
5. Go beyond Checkpoint Charlie. Yes, it’s Berlin’s most-visited tourist attraction, so go ahead and snap a few photos here, but to really learn something about the history of Berlin, spend an hour at the nearby Topography of Terror before proceeding to the Documentation Center on Bernauer Strasse. There, climb the stairs of the tower to get an overview of how the wall looked from the watch towers. “Most people think there was one single wall, painted with grafitti,” Nicole says. “But there were two walls, with the death strip between them, and the watch towers looking over them.”

If you have time, it is also worth a visit to Stasi Gefängnis, where ex-politcal prisoners give guided tours through the former prison.

Where To Dine
“Ma (Tim Raue) is Berlin’s most exclusive restaurant at the moment,” Nicole says. Serving Asian-inspired cuisine, the restaurant is situated at Behrenstrasse 72, directly behind the Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin. The chef is Tim Raue, Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant 44 at Swissôtel Berlin and Chef of the Year 2007 by Gault-Millau, Germany. Ma Tim Raue

For lunch, check out:

• Diekmann am Weinhaus Huth, offering French style food on Potsdamer Platz
• Zoe Berlin, stylish ambience with good food
• Gorilla Bio Fast Food, organic and good
• W Imbiss, healthy fast food, with such dishes as fresh made Naan pizza.

Best nightlife: “The best clubs are hidden; it makes them more exclusive,” Nicole says. To join the exclusive crowd, find your way to Solar Berlin at Stresemannstrasse 76. If you succeed in finding it, you’re in – in more ways than one.

SOMEWHERE IN THE BALTIC SEA, July 1 — It is near midnight, or at least that it is what my watch tells me. The sun and sky suggest otherwise. The bright orange orb hovers over the watery horizon, casting a reddish-yellow glow on a cloudless sky.

My (then) wife and I stand on our stateroom balcony waiting for the sun to dip below the horizon. Our body clocks are out of sync, six times zones east of our home (we’ll lose two more hours as the clock moves forward one hour on each of the first two nights of our cruise from Copenhagen).

The sun seems that it will never set, even as the clock ticks — and ticks.

What a mysterious and enchanting region of the world. We are cruising at the same latitude as the Alaska Panhandle, yet aside from the midsummer sky that hardly darkens, the Baltic Sea’s similarities to Alaska are few.

For starters, we will visit not one but six countries during our cruise. Our ship will disgorge us in some of the world’s most fabled cities.

On the Baltic Sea’s eastern edge, at the head of the Gulf of Finland, we will explore Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg — for two days. No less impressive is the Baltic Sea’s western edge, marked by Elsinore, Denmark, which lays claim to Kronborg Castle, the setting for Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

In between and along the shores of the Baltic are fairy tale lands. Copenhagen gave the world Hans Christian Andersen, Sweden gave us Astrid Lindgren, creator of “Pippi Longstocking.”

Indeed, having inserted ourselves into the comfortable fuselage of an SAS jet to travel across the Atlantic and step out on Danish soil seven hours later felt like a fairy tale. It still amazes me that I can leave a small city in America and wake up the next morning in Europe.

Our days were sunny and hot (not once would we pull out the fleece we had packed). And though we had not a single day of rain on our cruise, precipitation throughout the Baltic averages 24 inches annually. By contrast, Ketchikan receives 150 inches of rain yearly.

While we would see no snow-capped mountains or glaciers, we would stroll wide pedestrian streets free of cars, sip coffee at charming outdoor cafes, suck up nearly 20 hours of sunshine each day, marvel at world class museums, stand among opulent palaces and walk along well-preserved medieval town walls.

For two weeks (a 10-night cruise combined with four nights in Copenhagen), we would live a fairy tale in these enchanting lands.

Our fairy tale began in Copenhagen, where we popped out the front door of our hotel (The Phoenix, near trendy Nyhavn) and smack into a procession of toy-soldier-like sentries making their way to the Royal Palace for the changing of the guard at noon. Here, I told my children, lives a real queen. They looked up at me with mouths agape. It was the first of many surprises for them during our blissful Baltic cruise.

To read more, click on Baltic Bliss.