Back from Berlin - part two.

On Friday afternoon, we went to the girls' choice of the Natural History museum and it was a good one!  The dinosaur hall in particular is very well done and happily all the information was in English as well as German as both K & M spent a long time reading the vast majority of it!  We saw:

The world recording holding tallest mounted dinosaur, a very impressive brachiosaurus

Possibly the most famous fossil in the world, an archaeopteryx.

K & M were also very happy to find a fossil, which they said was Half Tooth, the smilodon (sabre toothed cat) that is the main character featured in one of the Walking With Beasts episodes (a series that followed Walking With Dinosaurs). 

Half Tooth.

We also spent time finding out about plate tectonics, watching a video that went from the Big Bang to present day and then from 'here' zooming out until they talked about the billions of galaxies each with billions of stars.

Our final day we went out to Potsdam.  It wasn't the best time of year to visit the huge Sanssouci park, as even the statues had been covered by rather sinister looking grey hut like constructions, presumably to protect them over winter.  We did go into Sanssouci palace, which was rather impressive though.  In the afternoon we went somewhere for the girls, a hands-on science museum for children, called Extavium, which had some really good things.  Among other things we did an experiment on probability and talked about bell curves, K lifted a car and both girls loved the darkroom where you waited for the flash to make shapes on the light sensitive wall.

K lifting a 'Trabbie', 'the' East German car.

Making their moves!

For the evening of our last day we'd booked to visit the dome of the Reichstag, which was quite interesting and reinforced quite a lot of what we'd learned about earlier in the week.  They have guides in various languages and a children's one but only in German.  A got one in English and I got the children's German one with the plan to translate for the girls, but it was so bizarre and sort of aurally cartoony and nonsensical a lot of the time that it didn't really work, but the girls found it hilarious to listen to the silly voices and funny music, so they enjoyed it anyway!

The Reichstag.

The Brandenburg Gate from the dome of the Reichstag.

We had a packed lunch each day (taking bread rolls with cheese from the enormous breakfast buffet at the hotel) and ate out each evening.  K & M are getting much better at trying new things, so we were able to eat in German restaurants a couple of evenings and they each ate schnitzel, as well as trying some of my spatzle, which M liked but K didn't.  We did have Italian the rest of the time though.

Something else that was very noticeable was just how confident and independent K & M can be.  This was particularly apparent when it came to going to the loo.  It didn't bother them in the slightest that they speak pretty much no German, they would happily go off to find it on their own.  I, on the other hand, found it slightly nerve-wracking when they did this!

Unfortunately the end of the holiday was pretty awful as K was sick.  Not just a bit, but copiously and repeatedly from 10pm pretty much all night to the point that we thought she and I might not be able to fly home and we had my parents on stand by to look after M.  Happily we managed to get home, but the journey did involve more vomit both in Berlin and Luton and was pretty horrendous.  Both K & M, who was very upset and unsettled by not knowing where she was going to end up that night, were absolute troopers, because without their efforts we might not have managed.