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My Bike!

I picked up my bike this afternoon. I can't remember the last time I rode one before today. It was a little scary riding around on the streets by the Hauptbahnhof (a very busy part of town), but once I got to the southern edge of the English Garden it was all easy -- we live just a few blocks from the garden, farther north, so mostly I rode through there. I stopped along the way and took a few pictures, which are above. I love my bike!

The pictures: my bike getting better acquainted with the English Garden; the Monopteros in the English Garden; the view from my bench.

My New Bike

Today I got a bike! Well, I will actually pick it up on Monday. I can't wait to have my own wheels to get around town on!

We went down to a big bike shop near the Hauptbahnhof this morning. Then, after I picked out my bike, we took the U-Bahn over to the city palace and had lunch outdoors in the garden. It was so beautiful! They have spring flowers in all the big planters down around Marienplatz, with tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, and peonies blooming. I wish I'd taken my camera! (I almost always do, but today I forgot to bring it!)

After lunch we walked home through the English Garden. I know I've mentioned it before (it was where I took the pictures last weekend) but today I saw some new parts of it. Including a huge nude sunbathing area. With a whole bunch of completely naked people. To American eyes it is really astounding. But it's nice, I think, that people can go out there in the sun and lie around naked if they want to. Why not?

I can't wait til I get my bike!

Click on pictures to enlarge.

Here are a few pictures from Sunday afternoon in the English Garden. A family of geese (you should have seen that big one hissing at a big blackbird who landed nearby), the Chinese Tower beer garden (the oompah band is sitting up on the second level), and pictures of Marty and me enjoying the sun. We put the big picnic mat we got for Christmas to use for the first time.

Marty is working tonight until after 9pm (this is what happens when you have meetings with people in Connecticut) but I won't be home this evening anyway. I'm going to check out a chorus here in Munich. I know a woman who sings in it, and I also know the director, and I'm going to hear them sing and see if I want to get involved. It could be fun. I don't really know if my voice is good enough, but I thought I'd at least check it out.

It's a gorgeous day today, sunny and warm. Yesterday afternoon we had cold thundershowers. It's real spring weather here. But as you can see from the pictures, the leaves are coming on the chestnut trees, and everything is starting to look a lot better. Happy Wednesday, everyone.

Blog Roundup

I heard today from an American woman in Zurich with a weblog: Rashunda Tramble. The very first entry I looked at was enough to let me know I would need to come back for more! Because it's so true, about the little old ladies in the grocery store! Anyway, check out her site.

Rashunda said she found my weblog through the Writer's Digest site, where it seems they're re-running an excerpt from that 2001 article in Personal Journaling about weblogs. So hello to anyone who may be coming over from Writer's Digest today. You may notice that the article is somewhat out of date, in that I now live in Germany, not Connecticut. But Raspberry World is still largely the same as it was two years ago. (With the exception, perhaps, of the demise of my actual online journal in favor of the weblog.)

In other weblog news, Rana has a new word up at her photoblog, Photoeclectic. Go check it out, and send her a picture to use!

I still have more pictures of Berlin, and I hope to put together a new Postcard page for them in the next day or two. (Yeah, I know you've heard that before!) But in the meantime, I found this page with great shots of some of the most important Berlin Sehenswürdigkeiten (literally, items that are worthy of seeing), which you may want to look at as well.

The English Garden was lovely this afternoon. We walked to the Chinese Tower beer garden and had lunch and a beer, with the band playing on the second level of the tower up above the crowds. The chestnut leaves are just starting to fill in, and everyone seems so relieved that spring is here at last. Frühling!

Click to enlarge pictures.

Potsdam

We made a day trip to Potsdam from Berlin last Wednesday. I think I've already talked a little about it. There is a lot of renovation and refurbishment going on there since the reunification of Germany. The picture at left is Sans Souci, Frederick the Great's palace. It's a lovely little Rococco marvel. We toured it with a big group of Germans.

Also interesting (to us) in Potsdam were these apartment buildings (at right) built during the East German days. The architecture is very East German -- utilitarian and depressing -- but this new paint job does wonders for the whole aspect of the buildings. I wish I could've gotten a picture of the whole street -- half a kilometer at least of these buildings painted like pink and yellow paint chips. It was really lovely.

Today the weather in Munich is gorgeous, so we are headed out to the English Garden to walk around, have a beer, and get some sun.

Click on the images to enlarge.

The Smaller But Older Gate for Me

At left you see Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. I took the picture Monday night around dusk, just before we climbed the Reichstag dome. This is probably the most famous symbol of Berlin -- particularly reunited Berlin. While the wall was standing, it ran just along the side of the gate (you can see a picture of that from 1969, here). The gate itself stood in the "death strip," a no man's land in East Berlin that lay just within the wall.

Today, the gate is a symbol of reunited Germany. It has been renovated in the past few years and now traffic no longer drives through it (the fumes were damaging to the gate).

The nearby town of Potsdam also has a Brandenburg Gate, shown in the picture on the right. According to our tour guide in Potsdam, this gate is smaller but older than the one in Berlin. Potsdam, formerly in East Germany, is probably best known as the site of the Potsdam Conference during the last days of World War 2, where Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met to determine the future of Germany. This is the meeting that resulted in the divided nations of East and West Germany. During the East Germany days, much of Potsdam was taken over by the KGB; today these buildings are being renovated as private homes again. Potsdam is also the home of some beautiful palaces built by Frederick the Great, including Sans Souci, which we toured on Wednesday.

And now we come to the Laura Petix portion of our travelogue. I only wish I had a picture of the other Shrunkin', which was inside the Easy Internet cafe on Kudamm. Shrunkin' and the web, all in one easy location! (I should mention that I've seen neither Starbucks nor Dunkin' Donuts in Munich; I was very surprised to see them in Berlin. However, London was full of Starbucks when we were there last March.)


Click on the images to enlarge.

Click on pictures to enlarge.

Back from Berlin

Well, we had a grand time in Berlin. I can't believe I've never been there before! It's a very exciting city, and we had a fun week exploring it. Marty was there in 1988 (one year before the wall came down) and he commented more than once that it feels like a completely different city now. He couldn't even recognize a lot of the places he'd visited in '88 around where the wall used to be, on both the east and west sides, because the whole area has changed so much.

After the disappointment with the Italian train strike last weekend, we used our Germany guidebook by Rick Steves to find a hotel in Berlin on short notice, and, as always, his advice was great. We stayed at a hotel right off Kurfürstendamm (or the Ku'damm as they call it in Berlin), the main shopping street in the city. The restaurants we ate at were very good, and there is lots of international cuisine. It is a bigger city than Munich and is changing so much from day to day that there's a kind of energy that I've never really felt so strongly in a city before. It is just very exciting.

We used the public transportation system the whole time we were there -- U-Bahns, S-Bahns, and buses -- and that went fine too, although the system is a lot bigger and more fragmented than what we are used to. When the city was divided into east and west, there was really no way to do any kind of integrated upgrade to the system, and so a lot of the train stations on the eastern side look like they must have looked over 50 years ago. They are old-fashioned and small, with lots of old tilework from the 1920s and iron bannisters on the stairs. I have some pictures I'll post later.

The two pictures I'm sharing tonight (before I head to bed) are from two of my favorite things we did in Berlin. On Monday night we went to the Reichstag, the German capitol building. It is an old building that was burned during World War 2. It was completely refurbished after reunification when Berlin once again became Germany's capitol, and now it has an amazing glass dome that you can climb up inside (which we did). The first picture was taken from the front steps as we were waiting to go inside on Monday night. It was a gorgeous evening, breezy and warm, and you can see one of the flags flying on top of the Reichstag with the moon rising in the distance.

I took the other picture yesterday morning, Thursday. The Berggruen museum in Berlin is primarily a Picasso museum, but at the moment they have a very extensive exhibit of Matisse's papercuts/decoupage pieces. Oh my goodness. This art is just gorgeous. I have seen pictures of it for years, of course, but I'd never seen any of it close up. They have many famous pieces on display right now including Prometheus and several of his blue nudes. When we arrived at the museum yesterday, ten minutes before opening time, these men were outside hanging the banner from the front. We had gorgeous weather the whole time we were in Berlin, as you can probably see.

I hope to post more of the pictures later this weekend. In the meantime, I'm just glad to be home! And headed for my own bed again. (Ziggy seems glad we're back, too.)

We are home! After a great trip to Berlin.

Mostly I am checking to see if my post will appear on the page. If so, I'll update later.

Blogger is driving me crazy!!!

This entry written Sunday morning in Munich; posted Tuesday night in Berlin, because of Blogger problems.

Plans Change...

Due to a train strike in Italy, we're postponing our trip to Florence and instead going to Berlin this week. So we are headed out in an hour or so and we'll be back Friday.

The funniest thing is, this trip was originally supposed to be a trip to Vienna. It's our tenth anniversary in a couple of weeks, and we'd decided to celebrate by going to Vienna, which we'd both visited before, but not together. Then, Mary and Michael were going to be in Florence, so we decided to go there instead. Now with the train strike, we wanted someplace we could get pretty fast as a replacement. It'll take us about five - six hours on the ICE to get to Berlin. At least we're flexible, man. It probably helps with the whole marriage thing, too.

Anyway, we're really sorry to miss meeting up with Mary and Michael. But other than that, Berlin is a fine destination. I think the top three cities on my list to visit in Europe are Vienna, Florence, and Berlin. And Berlin's the only one I've never seen before. So yeah. We'll be back Friday. Catch you on the other side!

We're staying near Zoo Station! So of course I'm taking Achtung Baby and Zooropa. Coooool!

Antique Hall in the Residenz, Munich.

Well, we are off to Florence tonight.

The night train leaves after 11pm tonight, and tomorrow morning we'll be in Italy. We're meeting our friends Mary and Michael there (they were here in Munich last week; now they're in Venice).

I am really looking forward to the trip, although I don't feel like I've prepared as much as I could have or should have. But I expect it'll be a lot of fun anyway.

We have a teenager coming in to take care of Ziggy while we're gone. And I think everything else is settled, too. Now we just need to pack!

The pictures in this entry are from this past Monday, when Mary and Michael and I toured the Residenz (the city palace) in Munich. We saw the royal Bavarian crown jewels, Nymphenburger porcelain painted in Munich, and all kinds of fancy things. The place is huge. It would take hours and hours to go through the whole thing. And there are TONS of stairs.

Catch y'all on Thursday, when we come back!


Mary and Michael in the Antique Hall.

Just a few of Robin's forty Vespas, as seen from my dining room window one March afternoon.

Small World

I just noticed that Amanda's oh-so-cute Vanessa Jean purse came from Hamden. I didn't realize it was local!

Our house is still for sale in Hamden. I don't have much to say about it, really, because, well, what is there to say? It's still for sale. After my first six months in Munich, I have to say that's the only thing that bothers me about leaving. I wish we could've sold it sooner. Maybe now that spring is coming, something will work out. Unfortunately I think people just don't want to make long-term decisions and major purchases with the war going on.

Other than the house, so far it seems like moving here was a good decision for both Marty and me. He works a lot but we both enjoy being here, and we spend the weekends together more often than we did in Connecticut. (In Connecticut he usually worked on Saturdays, and here he never does.) My German has improved so much since I came here. Marty gets a lot of home-cooked dinners these days. Nobody's complaining about those things.

Speaking of my old home place, the New Haven Register ran an article on Sunday about New Haven area online journalers. Two of the journals mentioned were two of my daily reads -- Dana and Rob. It cracked me up that the writer called Dana a "sassy lass." The article was decent; at least it didn't make online journalers/webloggers look like freaks. (Well, not any more than we actually are freaks...)

But all news is not happy in my little world of online journals. A few of my favorites have disappeared in the last couple of weeks. I know this is a transitory hobby, and people discontinue their journals for all kinds of perfectly natural personal reasons, but as a reader, I can't help but be a little sad when they come to an end. Even when there are new projects to look forward to. So rest in peace, Mighty Like a Rose, Tapestry, and Rainy Days and Mondays. Thanks for all the great reading.

A question from tonight's "Wer wird Millionär?"

Was kann man nicht trinken?

a. orangejuice
b. tablewater
c. milkshake
d. stretchlimo

Haaaa! (And the guy did get it right: d.)

Detail of a bust by Carrier, housed in Munich's Neue Pinakothek museum.

Today we have gray clouds in Munich -- as we've had every day since last weekend -- but right now I can see a patch of blue out my window. I'd be so glad if the sun came out, especially since our friends Mary and Michael are arriving from Pennsylvania today. Munich is always a beautiful city, but it is especially nice to see it in the sunshine. Still, if it rains the whole time they're here, at least there are more museums than you could ever visit in five days. I'm sure we'll stay busy!

Speaking of museums, and visitors, I took the picture above when we visited the Neue Pinakothek while Kathryn was visiting. I think Mary and Michael went the last time they were in Munich, so I expect we'll take in some different museums this time.

My Birkenstocks are suddenly very comfortable. Actually, I guess this happened early this week. It didn't take as long as I expected for them to adjust to my feet (or maybe, for my feet to adjust to them).

Well, not much news here at the moment. Just wanted to say hello, and I'm still kickin'.

[11:38 AM] Edited to add: And now? It's snowing.

This cablecar system is how we got up to the top of the mountain on Sunday. We passed this fellow as he was on his way back down.

It's a beautiful, sunny day in Munich today. Spring really seems to be on its way for real, now. The trees are budding and you can see leaves starting to form, and the sun is shining a lot more than it was a month ago.