Last night the TV tower was covered in fog, illuminated from behind by the blue lights of the Radisson hotel. A strange and lovely sight!

So, I'm sure all of you are getting tired of looking at building after building ... so I'll try to break up the monotony from now on. Yesterday we took a walking tour of a really cool neighborhood called Moabit, which used to be a working-class neighborhood a century ago and now is more of an immigrant area. We really loved walking down the streets, with all sorts of great fruit and vegetables and interesting shops and lots of people - it was a lot more homey than our neighborhood, which is nice but a little less lively. Here is a picture of a memorial to the deportation of the Jews. It is a really cool design, with a box car and a ramp and stone sculptures, but at night it's a little hard to photograph ...

We visited one of the oldest covered markets in Berlin. Our classmate Sara and I couldn't resist going for a ride, much to the disapproval of the old Berliner men sitting at the cafe next door.

As promised yesterday, we did go see a factory designed by Peter Behrens around the turn of the century. After this I promise, really, no more buildings ...

We ended the day with a very meaty class dinner at a Persian restaurant. The flavors were very exotic!

Here is a picture of my foot walking, because walking is what we have been doing - surprise! - for the last two days. Yesterday we went on a political walk ...

Not to bore you with pictures of political buildings, but this is the new Kanzleramt (Chancellor's office - the German Chancellor, not Chance), which the Berliners call the Washing Machine. Berliners love to come up with derisive names for their monuments ... and it does sort of look like a washing machine, don't you think??

We swung past the Reichstag (the seat of the German parliament), which was a ruin until they relocated here from Bonn in the 90's. See that line of people out front? Yeah, they're waiting to get in...

We made a stop at what the Berliners term the "pregnant Oyster" - a former concert hall which is now a museum. (Berlin loves making things into museums. There is a museum for everything, and they're still building new ones.) Also visible is John Toews, our Fearless Leader.

Our last stop on this walking tour was the Siegessaeule (the Victory Column) which was, if I remember correctly, erected to commemorate one of Germany's victories over the French. It looks a lot shorter in this picture than it felt from the top ...

Despite the vertigo, the view from the top is gorgeous, with the monuments of the city in the background and the fall colors of the Tiergarten in front. As opposed to evergreen-inhabited Seattle, Berlin is a very dissiduous city. We are loving having a real "autumn"!

Here is Chance looking up at the angel of victory, surrounded by Regan and Brad (to the right) and the back of our roommate Jason's head.

Today we went on a tour of "Jewish Berlin." Our first stop was the synagogue on Rykstrasse, just a couple of steps from our front door. As you can see, the men are required to cover their heads inside the sanctuary ...

The interior is still being restored, but the synagogue survived largely intact, because it was the only one that the Nazis didn't burn down - it was too close to other apartment houses. It was built in 1904 and is beautifully decorated.

This is a Jewish graveyard which was used from the mid-19th century until just after the Second World War. Many influential Berliners are buried here - bank presidents, politicians, and even the composer Meyerbeer. It was very beautiful but unfortunately has fallen into disrepair because of Nazi, DDR and recent vandalism, and neglect. Interestingly, the Jewish graveyards are the only ones which are not reused as burial sites. Protestants and Catholics rebury after a certain amount of time - our tour guide told us that if they didn't do so, the entire city of Berlin would be a graveyard by now... which we wouldn't want!

The entrance to the graveyard faces onto a street which, during the 19th century, was used by the king to reach one of his outlying palaces. He didn't like being forced to see the spectacle of Jewish funeral processions going up the street, so he had them build a back entrance to the graveyard especially for that.

One of our last stops was the "New Synagogue," which is no longer New and no longer really a synagogue, but it is very beautiful. As was the tree in front of it. Tomorrow, we're going to see a turn-of-the-century factory designed by Peter Behrens! Wish our feet luck!

Yesterday we all climbed on a train to Weimar, about 2 1/2 hours southwest of Berlin. It was part of the former East Germany, but it was not heavily bombed in World War 2, so most of it's picturesque buildings are still intact. It's a small and very beautiful city, known of course because the Weimar Constitution was signed here, but better known as the center of German culture! Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Liszt, Klee, Nietzche, the Bauhaus school, and Lucas Cranach die Aelter (whose workshop was in the brown building you see above) all called Weimar their home. Its lovely library just had a huge fire, which you may have heard about on the news.

This was the hard part of our visit to Weimar. Just outside the town is the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The motto on the gate says "To Each His Own." Over 50,000 people died here.

Pictures can't capture the desolation of this space. This area used to have the buildings where the prisoners slept. Over the trees in the distance is a beautiful view of the valley below, making the feeling of imprisonment all the stronger for seeing what lies beyond the fences.

This stump is what remains of "Goethe's Oak," named so by the prisoners. Legend has it that Goethe used to sit under this oak with his lovers, and from pictures and drawings it looks like it was a lovely tree. The Nazis had razed all the other trees (this was a gorgeous wood full of beech trees originally - hence the name Buchenwald which means Beech Wood) but left this one standing for some reason. Late in the war an incendiary bomb hit it and destroyed it. They filled the middle with cement to help keep it from rotting, and now it presents a stark picture, both in the literal and the metaphorical sense... Goethe represents everything that is good about German culture: art, literature, science - and tolerance as well. And behind the stump of the tree you can see the crematorium building. Truly a moving image.

Weimar has a beautiful park, which we walked through this morning after being turned away from the German Bee Museum (we had such high hopes, but it doesn't open til next year!). We instead got to visit Goethe's Garden House, where he lived temporarily while his patron, Prince Carl-August, tried to convince him to stay in Weimar. Apparently Geothe liked Weimar enough to stay, but moved out of this and built a Roman House just across the way. Eventually he moved closer to the center of town (see a couple of photos down).

Of course we had to stop for a sit on Goethe's Bench!

We visited Goethe's house, where he lived and worked for the last part of his life. It's near the center of town and has a lovely garden out back. It's really too bad they don't allow photography inside, because I would love to live in a place like this! (Surprise surprise...) It was quite spacious but not grandiose, just a lovely little working and socializing spot, perfect for Germany's ultimate Renaissance Man.

We had a photo op at this statue of Goethe and Schiller, with Chance reading from Goethe's most famous work, "Faust." He was motioning with his hand open, and then some Germans walked by and told us he should be making a "fist" if he was reading "Faust" - the word Faust means "fist" in German!

We finished up our day at the Neues Museum, where they had a bunch of really great works which were actually on loan from Berlin - early 20th-century works by Grosz, Dix, Klee, etc... and they also had these really humongous couches in the foyer which we were allowed to sit on!! It was like being a kid again, and there was even a really big remote control to change channels on a TV playing video art. And so Weimar continues to be a center of culture ...

It's been a couple of museum-filled days. Yesterday we visited Berlin's most famous museum - the Pergamon, named for this grand staircase belonging to a Greek temple along the Ionian coast of Turkey in the town of Pergamon. It was built in the 1st century B.C. and it is quite huge and breathtaking.

One of the other monumental attractions at the Pergamon is the Babylonian Ishtar Gate. It's made of glazed brick and dates back to around 600 B.C.

This is part of the wall of a Muslim palace from the 700's. It was built out in the Jordanian desert as a pleasure palace, but was never finished for lack of funds. The carving on it is absolutely phenomenal.

This is my very favorite artifact in the whole Berlin museum collection. If you've been to our apartment in Seattle, maybe you've seen a picture of it lying around... it's Turkish tile from the 17th century or thereabouts. It's absolutely wonderful and I wish I could have it...

Today we went on a "field trip" to the Egyptian Museum. We were supposed to meet here, in front of a Berlin palace, but as you can see, there was something going on! A diplomat was visiting from somewhere (we didn't recognize the flag), and he or she was important enough to warrant a marching band and a bunch of uniformed military marchers!

The Egyptian Museum is rather small - a holding place for a tiny portion of the collection (so they say) until they're done refurbishing the big museums and make room. We had fun wandering and learning about pharoahs.

The most famous artifact in the Berlin Egyptian collection is the bust of Nefertiti. And yes, she really is absolutely amazing. Gorgeous!

After looking at all those pieces of carved rock from Egypt, we got a little fresh air by walking around the back of the Schloss Charlottenburg, a palace built for one of the Friedrichs' wives. The weather was lovely...

This swan was completely convinced that we were going to feed it. It's obviously used to tourists, but still had a nasty temper - it hissed at us several times. Unfortunately we couldn't get it to hiss again for the camera.

Yep, that was one hungry, angry swan.

Protestants, Catholics and Swedish Meatballs

We are finally able to access the Internet from home, and since everyone has been so excited about our pictures, I decided I ought to post a few more from this week. As you'll see, our usual agenda of walking around Berlin did not change - we saw lots of architecture and learned about even more King Friedrichs!
Taking a momentary break from history, yesterday we finally made it down to IKEA, which was every bit as crowded, crazy, and disorienting as the one in Renton, to buy ourselves a reading lamp and a blanket for those freezing cold Berlin nights...

IKEA was celebrating its 30th year of being in Germany (or maybe just its 30th year in existence - someone back home will have to report to us about the Seattle IKEA!). They had a Dixieland quartet (complete with banjo) wandering around playing, plus, every 30th customer in the restaurant got their food for free! And guess who happened to be that customer? Yep, this picture here is of our free Swedish meatballs! (Since our plates were on one tray, they just gave us the whole thing gratis. I'm beginning to love IKEA even more than before.)
Here's what else we've been up to ...

Here's a building in Potsdamer Platz that caught our fancy. The former location of the Wall sliices right through this building! I don't know if that's why they decided to make it so wall-like, but it would be interesting if they did.

This is the gated entrance to a Catholic/Atheist graveyard from the late 19th century. Most of the headstones were removed during WWII, because the Catholics in Berlin were welcoming to many extremely liberal, scientific/atheist/communist people. Berlin has a fascinating religious/political history, which we got to learn about on this walking tour with a graduate student from Columbia. I also love this picture because it shows you how green Berlin is! There are lots of little nooks like this in the city where there are trees and grass and playgrounds for children.

Here is the inside of the Berlin Dom (the Berlin Cathedral). It was built as the showpiece of the Protestant church in the late 19th century. It is extremely baroque and actually a little too gaudy for our taste ...

The dome of the Berliner Dom ...

This is the stairway of the "Old Museum" near the old Prussian center of the city. We have been studying the architect who designed it in the early to mid-19th century - he meant this museum to be a "temple of art," to house copies of Greek statuary that were thought to be the epitomy of art at that time.

The front of the Old Museum - this building really makes it apparent how obsessed the Germans were with Greece at this time!
Next week, we get to go inside and look at the statues, as well as go on a trip to Weimar, where Goethe lived!

You may all be wondering who we're running around Berlin with every day ... here are about half of them (from the left: Sara, Raven, Kevin, Kristin, Jason [our roommate], Brad, Lynne, Kyle, Andrew, Martha and Wenzel). So far we've walked what feels like hundreds of miles, taking tours of Schinkel Berlin, Huguenot Berlin, Protestant/Catholic Berlin, Museum Berlin ... and shockingly, there is much more still to see.
Frisbee update: the new frisbee has been tested, on the lawn in front of the Berliner Dom and the former East German parliament! It works fine, even in the very windy Berlin afternoon. We can't wait to find a good park to play in.

Hi! Berlin is getting cold and windy, though it's sunny and beautiful. The leaves are changing colors and falling, and the light is orange and October-ish.
We are having fun visiting museums this week -- the picture above is of the two of us in front of the 'Kulturforum,' a building which houses, among other things, the gallery of Renaissance paintings. We spent a lovely Saturday afternoon looking at Duerer, Bosch and Brueghel there!
Today we visited the 'New National Gallery' (so named in the mid-1800's, so it's not exactly modern anymore), which houses mostly Romantic paintings. There were some Impressionists and Secessionists to be seen there too, which made it interesting.
We haven't even scratched the surface of Berlin museums, though! We have a lot to see yet.
Other than standing around looking at paintings, we've been reading and writing for class, drinking good coffee (nothing that competes with Joe Bar, though, of course), and discovering new ways to utilize the public transportation - the tram turns out to be a much faster way to get to school than the subway.
The most exciting development today, however, was the buying of a frisbee, which Chance accomplished this afternoon! We can't wait to get to a park and try it out. Wish us luck!

Hello! Sorry to have been out of touch. Finding internet access is tougher here than back home, and more expensive. We haven't had much time, either, as most of this week has been spent walking around parts of Berlin and nearby Potsdam! Here are pictures from Sans Souci park, which we visited today. It is a gorgeous complex of 19th century palaces and royal buildings. The sun was out and it was very fun!

There are 10 or so buildings in this park (maybe more), some of them very large, like this ostentatious "New Palace" and some smaller. It was a gorgeous day, and though we were hungry and a bit footsore, we walked around and took full advantage of the sunlight!

Here is the interior of a "Roman Bath" (yes, they built baths and even ruins in the 1800's here ... leave it to royalty to do something like this!)

Hi everyone! Here we are (do you like my new shoes?) at Potsdamer Platz's Sony Center, where there is a free wireless connection as long as you're willing to sit outside on these metal benches. This won't last long, as the weather will soon be far too cold. But today is pretty balmy, the sun is peeking out, and with a scarf it's not too bad! So I'm finally able to post pictures of our life here and our whirlwind trip around Europe. So here we go ...

Here is our new neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg. This area was on the western border of former East Berlin, so for years it was pretty empty. Most of these buildings were built in the late 1800's as housing for factory workers. Most have courtyards and 5 levels with big, spacious, high-ceilinged apartments. Ours has been nicely remodelled, as you'll see. There's a bit of a problem with graffiti here in Berlin, so it might look like a rough neighborhood, but actually it's one of the more fashionable and upscale neighborhoods here, and it's perfectly safe at all hours. You can tell that fall is starting, with the leaves beginning to cover the ground ...