Blog 3 - Leipzig, Berlin and the great recalibration

Blog 3 - "Leipzig, Berlin and the great recalibration"

From the people that bought you "Harry Potter and the..." No not really...

This is a bit of a catch up blog, reminding you (and me) of what we did last week! Currently I'm in a Krakowian (I'm sure that's a word) cafe, sapping their free wifi, and awaiting a train to Prague (an overnighter sleeper...oohh, hoity-toity) after a week in Poland. That blog will come in a matter of days...it's basically that our accommodation promised wifi and delivered, well, not much of anything really. Zlotys don't go far these days.

Back to Leipzig, or as I like to say, "that place where we did four loads of washing"!

We had a few days there, and it was basically just to break up our train journey to Berlin. It's a pretty place, but where we stayed was a bit backwater, a fair hike to the Mitte/Altstadt/Stare Miasto...place with the pretty old buildings and town square.

Our accommodation through AirBNB (get on it if you're travelling) had cats and rabbits, which the daughters loved, but was about 2mx2m which left us a little stir crazy (more on that to follow...)

 

I had a beer called Gose, made using coriander and salt. It was a bit of a perfumey boutique experience, and I loved it after two sips, and after five sips I was a little over the experience.

 

Other than washing, renae bought a new backpack and I spend three hours trying to send her old one (plus a LOT of clothing, gee we overpacked!) back to Melbourne. It very nearly ended with me throwing it in the nearest river due to a combination of my poor German language, and Deutche Post bureaucracy. (Computer sagt "nein"!). Sharon it's on it's way back! ;)

Then there was Berlin, the highlight of the trip for me so far. We were greeted at our apartment - the view looked over the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, the reichstag and the Brandenburg gate, and Hitler committed suicide in his bunker underground about 50 metres from us.

We hit the Zoo, the biggest in Europe. I was worried we'd peaked at Singapore, but the berlin one was still great (still, our kids could go to a park with a meerkat and anorexic squirrel and find it captivating!). The aquarium was the best I'd seen though!

 

Running around the Tiergarten - the enormous parkland that makes up a good part of Berlin, was a highlight. Getting lost, not so much.

We did a four hour walking tour of the city, which (if its possible) exhausted and captivated us all, including the girls who retained almost all of it. Nikolai our guide took us through the many eras of berlin, from early settlement, to the Kaisers, to the Nazi rule and then the wall up/down and present day. It was brilliant. Girls loved the stories of escape from the "death zone", and the memorials to the book burning, Kristallnacht and Holocaust victims were so moving.

(Memorial to the holocaust...tiergarten in background)

And then we made our own chocolate...! See, something for everyone!!

 

Kept the museums to a minimum, though the Pergamon Musuem and museum island generally were amazing. We've seen a lot of things in our one month already that have the title "UNESCO heritage listed", and for that I'm grateful, and feel fortunate.

 

And the food...pig knuckles OMG (takes a lot for me to use that rather overused acronym)...and theyre quite fond of beer...in fact they are throughout Europe.

We then caught the train to Warsaw...aahh but that's for another time. Renae's off looking for an English book for Billie. Jess has embarked on Harry Potter #1, so that's her whole holiday reading taken care of!

We're still having fun, but learning that more time in less places, a bit of countryside action, meeting families at hostels, and splitting the girls up sometimes are important for everyone's ongoing sanity!

 

Post again real soon. Love to all from the Carolinvandenbergs.

 

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