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Showing posts from October, 2006

Zoologischer Garten

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On Saturday, we all went to the Zoo, which is right in downtown Berlin. It was opened in 1844 with a gift of animals from Frederick the ?'s animal garden and menagerie. Now there are 14,000 animals in a leafy setting. I think it is the prettiest zoo I've been to. The chickens (yes, chickens) have a half-timbered chicken house, and the giraffes live in a mosaic mosque with minarets. Some other beast has a thatched roof. This was a black-eared marmoset. We were enjoying them running around and then realized that there was a wee baby, smaller than your thumb, on the back of one of them. We also loved the baby chimpanzee, but decided not to put that picture up, because it looked so much like a little girl in our old ward. I love our camera! I love the hippos in Berlin! We arrived just at feeding time, but this was afterward, when the hippo was just showing off for Rob. They are a favored animal here, and they have a great big hippodome where you can watch them above and below wa

Preserving the Assets

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My friend's husband is a microlender who often uses the phrase "preserve the asset" to mean that he wants her to take care of herself. My parents are both having foot problems, the boys are both having ear problems, and Maddie has bronchitis as we found out from our visit to a cross-eyed doctor on Thursday. So we are very into preserving our assets right now (what's left of them!). On Wednesday, Grandma Shumway and I went up to the neighborhood palace, Charlottenburg, and walked around the grounds. It was a beautiful and unusually warm day and I was trying to get used to our camera again. There is a small French garden just behind the palace, but most of the rest of it is wild, or an English garden with rivers and bridges. Then my parents rented a nice Volvo and Rob and I drove them down to Potsdam. This is a picture of the Jagdschloss Glienicke or the hunting palace Glienicke. Another gorgeous day. This is the neo-Gothic Schloss Babelsberg which was designed by Ka

Gorgeous Fall Days

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Right now several big buildings and monuments are lit up at night, probably to prolong tourism since it is getting dark at about five now and we're losing four minutes of daylight a day (about two minutes more than most of you). We liked the Brandenburg Gate and we are thrilled that our replacement camera finally arrived, so we were trying it out in low light. The Grandparents Shumway rented a car yesterday and so Rob drove them through town, then out to Potsdam where we had a whirlwind through-the-park-and-step-out-at-the-palaces tour that lasted until sunset. Then we went home and switched babysitter and drove back to see the lit up things from the Reichstag to the Unter den Linden Opera house and had dessert at the Opera Palace Cafe. This is the New Palace in Potsdam which is incredible, but off the more beaten San Souci path. Grandma Shumway brought lots of Halloween decorations and the kids had great fun putting them up. Here Will and Grandpa enjoy Homestarrunner.com and ot

The Grandparents Have Landed

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For those of you concerned, the Shumways arrived today on time and in good shape. Good enough that they survived several hours of incessant talking and enthusiastic bouncing by their grandchildren and a dinner of wurst and kartoffel puree. Now they are off to their own apartment (in our building) with more African knickknacks and animal prints than you ever thought they could withstand. Sweet dreams on the savannah!

Two Car Garage

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Here are the current McFarland family vehicles. The stroller is for Sebastian when he deigns to ride in it, and for all of our sightseeing stuff when he doesn't. The other thing is a shopping cart so we can load up all the heavy groceries and not pull our arms out on the walk home. Rob said today that it's the best 10 euros we've spent since we got here. If you're not Sebastian or a grocery, you're on your own two feet.

Pod Toilet Erlebnis

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This post is dedicated to Kathryn Isaak, who didn't get to one of these during her short stay in Berlin. This is a public restroom. Like lots of WCs in Europe, you must pay to use it. Maddie is navigating the sensors for the faucet, soap, and hand dryer here. The difference is that this is entirely automatic and self-cleaning. It gives each customer up to 20 minutes and then it cleans itself (unless you are handicapped, and then you get 40 minutes). The toilet seat rotates around and gets cleaned, the floor gets cleaned, etc. There is space age music, which I wasn't expecting. Usually there are women at each restroom who keep it clean and you give them some coins in exchange. I would think that the union of toiletten damen would be up at arms about this, because it might threaten job security if robots were doing what they do, but so far I have only seen five in Berlin, so perhaps it isn't an issue.

Laterne Saturday in Prenzlauerberg

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Today was one of those days that we couldn't have planned, and if we'd planned it, it would never have worked out. We had no plan this morning. I scrubbed the bathroom floor and Rob went shopping, but not only did he do the family shopping, he invited Maddie and Will to come with him. This boggles my mind. I would rather have minor dental work done than go shopping with my children, not least because Will always talks me into something overpriced and unnecessary. Rob came home with a box of Frucht Tiger, which is a juice drink of dubious nutritional value, so I think he got off light. I will note here that Maddie and Will have been playing beautifully for the last week. I don't know what changes, but now they will go off for hours and play royalty or rescue heroes and I'll see them both sitting fully-clothed in the bathtub making up stories. Yesterday Maddie found a "chip" which she used to determine Will's makeup. She said that Will is "one percent

Konzerthaus on a Friday Night

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So this week has seen yet another crisis that took up too much time. It would bore you, but it is important to know that we are still scrubbing bathroom floors and grocery shopping and standing in long communist-era lines and dodging doo-doo on the sidewalks. Unlike when we have a stressful situation at home, we can escape here and let Sarah play poker with the kids while we go out to a concert at the Schauspielhaus. This was a building designed by Schinkel (you will remember that he is the architect/decorator/set designer who put his neo-classical/neo-gothic mark on Berlin). It sits in the middle of the Gendarmenmarkt between the French cathedral and the German cathedral and the whole plaza was memorialized in a story called "My Cousin's Corner Window" written by ETA Hoffmann, whom you know because he also wrote the story upon which the Nutcracker was based (and while we are way off topic, you should know that the story is a lot more bizarre and has a lot fewer corps de

Glienicke Summer Palace and Bridge

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Now that the kids are back in school, learning to write their ones and sevens strangely, Rob and Sebi and I tried to get in another palace on Wednesday morning. Weather here was still gorgeous and we rode down to Wannsee, which is this lake, as seen through the pergola. This was a Venetian/Byzantine 'curiosity' on the palace grounds. It was right next to the Orangerie where the head gardener let us peek in as they were bringing all of the palms and citrus in for the winter. She said that it was state of the art for the 1830's and had radiators inside to keep the plants warm. Rob and Sebastian checking out the perpetually spitting lions. This shot shows the historical pieces that they bought up and hung on the walls as decoration. This alone explains why Athens looks like it does these days (and, by extension, what anyplace might look like after a few centuries of tourism). This palace is right next to the Berlin city limits, and the bridge (Glienicker Brucke) where the e

Gardens and Trains

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Last Sunday, we took a walk next to our house. I couldn't believe it, but we are only two blocks away from a garden colony and the S-Bahn tracks. They're hidden behind some apartment buildings, but I have never heard the trains going by. The kids were very excited to watch the trains go in and out of the station, and they tried to get the drivers to wave to them as they left. Eastbound drivers are more likely to wave from our short experience. On unused train rights of way, people can buy leases and have a small garden plot which is called a Schrebergarten. These had obviously been around for a long while and most of them had a teeny house too. This allows the trains to get rent money out of the real estate while they're not using it, and makes it easy to use it when they need to. It also lets people get gardens and second homes and the land looks a lot better than it would if it were left unattended. The garden colony had a lot in common with our neighborhood in Grandvi

To Quedlinburg and Wernigerode

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On a tip from John and Tania Lyon, who came here with their two daughters last year, we decided to drive down to Quedlinburg on Saturday. This is a little town in between Leipzig and Magdeburg whose old downtown district was all put on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1994 because it is all halftimbered and crooked and darling. My dad would get "quainted out" pretty quickly here. We started out at a market outside the city wall where we bought pumpkins for the kids, some vintage postcards for Rob, and a Playmobil castle for only 10 euro (these are pricey toys, and MA had been thinking of spending too much money for a castle, so it was a great financial boon to have found one for so little). Once everyone was happy with their chattelizing, we wandered through town. Part of the charm of this place is just that it isn't yet all prettified. As we were driving up, most of the signs had little additions stuck onto them saying "and Quedlinburg!" as if the new tour

Day Trip to Dresden

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On Wednesday we gave the kids a break from the car. We stuck around the house, went to the park, used the car to drive to the store and buy lots and lot of heavy things, and then drove around Berlin in the evening. We visited Rob's other Berlin mission area in Neukoelln and Kreuzberg and then went out to dinner at a great Turkish place and had wicked good doener kebaps. Mmm. So on Thursday we got up and drove down to Dresden. It was about two hours, depending on the vagaries of traffic, construction, and thinking that you left the camera at home only to find that you'd packed it in the backpack after all. We wandered into town just as bells were playing "Oh God the Eternal Father" across the Elbe river. Rob informs me that Mendelssohn wrote the music, though I don't know what the German title is. We started off next to the Semper Opera, which was burned, bombed and flooded in that order. Now it is famous throughout Germany because it's in a beer commercial. W

A Day at Warnemunde

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So I realize that it isn't an obvious solution, to stick five coughing, barking people in a car and drive to the end of the continent, but it worked. On Tuesday we took off for the Ostsee and went to the beach just above Rostock. We managed once again to cheat fall, and had a few hours more of summer temperatures and even some sun. The kids had a great time splashing in the water and squealing and playing in the sand. Sebastian found this beach easier to deal with since the waves were only about six inches high. He also decided to throw all the sand back into the water, which was a nice project that kept him busy. It doesn't look like it, but there were lots of people on the beach playing volleyball, swimming, sunning, and promenading up and down. In the meantime, Rob rented a Strandkorb or beach basket. You open them up and they recline and have footrests and you turn them toward or away from the sun but are sheltered from the wind. They're very handy and they'd be

Punting and Pickles

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So as part of our Preserving the Sanity in Herbst Ferien, we rented a car for a week. On Monday we drove about an hour southwest of Berlin and visited the Spreewald. a forest that contains the Spree river delta. Historically, it was where the farmers would load up their harvests and then punt up to Berlin to sell their goods (it took two days to punt into town). Luebben, is a cute town crossed by waterways and bridges. This was our kahn or punt just as we were taking off. I can't think of a place in the US that would come up with these details like tables and lap blankets and centerpieces on a boat ride. It is so German and so charming. The boat ride lasted about two hours and the kids were into it for about five minutes. To be fair, anyone who has ridden a punt before knows that it is peaceful, relaxing, and a good way to rest your feet. Anyone who has ever seen Sebastian at naptime when he is not asleep knows that this was an explosive combination. The nadir was probably when I