Last trip

This past weekend we took our final trip- we went to Berlin for a couple of days. In the end we didn't see too much, but we did hit the highlights. On Saturday we went to Checkpoint Charlie, which was a mad house. We didn't go into the museum itself, but instead we browsed through the gift shop and probably saw pictures all of the artifacts in the actual museum itself. The path of the wall is permanently marked in the streets by a band of bricks and interspaced columns. It is really interesting to see how it ran through huge squares and along individual streets.







On Sunday we walked over to the Tiergarten to see the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. We began at the Brandenburg Gate and headed over to the Reichstag. Again, as was true at the Musee D'Orsay, we were able to skip the giant line and enter via a special line for people with children. Yay! We passed through security and then entered an elevator that took us to the top of the Reichstag. Once there you can enter the dome on the top of the building. There is a pathway that winds up to the top of the dome itself. Charlie, Henry and I started up, but three steps in Henry changed his mind and went to stand with Steve at the bottom. The walk up was pretty short and the views from the top were amazing. Charlie took lots of pictures! After we left the Reichstag we walked through the Tiergarten which used to be the hunting groups for the royal family and marked the western edge of the city. Today it is a huge park and it has great manicured lawns, enormous statues and many areas that still resemble a forest. We finished our walk at the Memorial for hte Murdered Jews of Europe- an impressive field of granite stele. From a distance you just see the black blocks laid out, but when you actually get into it you realize that the ground itself undulates up and down. When you walk through the pathways, the stele are all different heights, some towering high above my head.







The best part of this trip however, was catching up with an old friend from hight school, Johanna. She has lived here in Berlin for the past 15 years and she and her husband Manuel have a little boy, Paulo (or as Henry thought, Apollo). We met up with them at their apartment and their block was having a street fair. The boys were able to do some bowling and listen to live music. We wandered over to a local biergarten for some dinner and caught up on what has happened in our lives in the past 20 years. It was a lot of fun and again I was amazed at how easy it was to fall back into a comfortable relationship with someone I hadn't seen in years. Johanna's family still lives in central NJ, so we made plans to meet up again when they visit in November.