Back from Berlin - part one.

Last Tuesday the girls and I joined A on a work trip (which he extended so he could spend time with us too) for the first time.  Despite having lived in Germany twice, first for a gap year as an au pair in Dusseldorf (and then briefly Dortmund when the family moved house), and then in Tubingen for a term at university as part of my degree, I had never visited Berlin and it's somewhere I've wanted to go for a while but had never got round to.

We left home at 9.30am and got to the hotel about 6.30pm, via bus, train, bus, plane, local train and underground, all having gone pretty smoothly. We had a special guest with us for this trip, as K had asked if we could take her Scout troop's mascot Phileas Frogg.

K with Phileas Frogg and Arnaud on the train.

A's work meetings were on Thursday from lunchtime and all day Friday, so we had the whole day together on the Wednesday.  First we went to The Story of Berlin (although not the bunker), which was pretty good.  The girls were interested enough that we ended up having a very late lunch!  Both girls are at an age now where (depending on subject matter of course and the amount of written material) they are either happy to read information or have it read to them an awful lot more than they used to, so it's more interesting for me too!

At the Story of Berlin K, Phileas & M.

Later we explored a bit and headed in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate but before we got that far we decided to go up the Fernsehturm and although conditions weren't ideal we got a reasonable view of the city (certainly better than it would have been later in the week, when we couldn't see the viewing and restaurant area at all!)

Up the Fernsehturm...

....and in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

On Thursday we went to the zoo all together before A had to go off for his meeting.  The zoo sparked some discussion about the merits of zoos, since the enclosures of the big cats in particular looked really inadequate, versus the difficulties of protecting animals from poachers in their natural habitat.  We've been to Chester Zoo a few times and have sometimes not seen the big cats there because their enclosures are much bigger and have plenty of plants and rocks which means that the cats can frequently be hidden, which we all agreed is much better than the guarantee of seeing them in a small enclosure.  In the afternoon the girls and I went to the aquarium too and then to the Lego shop on the Kurfurstendamm, which was a 5 minutes walk from the hotel, for the second time (they have several areas where you can just sit and build things!).

A very unobliging blue-tongued skink that stopped sticking its tongue out when I got the camera out!

Phileas with some new friends at the Aquarium.

Friday A had to work all day, so it was just me and girls.  After a final visit to the Lego shop, where each of the girls chose the parts to make and then buy their own Lego figure, we went to the museum at Checkpoint Charlie, which the girls weren't too keen on.  They found parts interesting, such as the different way that people escaped to the West, like hiding in a converted petrol tank and hiding in two suitcases that were pushed together with holes cut in the sides, and they found it interesting to see a very small scale model of a section of the wall, with a fence, barbed wire, a big space with watch towers and search lights and a ditch on the east side and nothing on the west side of the wall itself.  The presentation is very heavy on written material, and after the part about the wall, there was a lot about what went on on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, which was too much for the girls.  We all certainly learned a lot before we moved on though.

At the Checkpoint Charlie museum.

To be continued...