Our Last Day in Europe (Was a Long Time Ago)

As most of you who read this know, we actually left Europe AGES ago. Way back in July. Since our last day over there, though, things have been nuts, and are just now starting to calm down. We've been visiting family, job searching (done and done!), apartment hunting (done!), and catching up with friends. I figured that I still have these photos from our last day hanging out in Berlin, though, so why not share them? 

This is the little walk signal guy in Berlin (known as the "Ampfelmännchen," or "little traffic light man"); pretty awesome that he has a hat, right? 

In the photo below on the left, Will is standing in front of the apartment where he lived a few years back (with our friend Ben who was in our Italy posts) during a summer spent doing research on German literature for his senior thesis. The neighborhood has changed some since he was last there, but his favorite falafel and haloumi (a grilled Middle Eastern cheese similar to feta) restaurant was still there, and we even got to taste the fresh carrot-orange juice!  The photo on the right is one of the churches in that neighborhood. We got to go inside and check it out, and stayed for a minute to listen to a guy practicing the piano with those great church acoustics. 

After some more walking around we ended up at this park along the river. The weather was pretty perfect, so we picked up a couple German brews and hung out in the sun for a little bit. For all you SF people, this is basically the Dolores Park of Berlin: 

From the park we walked for a long time to get over near the more well-visited tourist spots. One of those spots is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial measures 4.7 acres and was designed to produce an uneasy and confusing atmosphere, according to this site, "the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason." 

Some of the sculptures are taller than others and even though the monument is built on a grid system, it is really easy to lose people. Lots of little kids were running through the corridors playing hide and seek; in a way it was nice to see the little ones unaffected by the reasons behind the memorial. The memorial is relatively recent, opening to the public on May 10, 2005, 60 years after the end of WWII.  

The memorial is located very close to a bunch of other important buildings like big embassies (the US and French to name a couple), fancy hotels, and the Reichstag building (photo below). The Reichstag building was originally constructed to house the parliament of the German Empire (Reich means "empire," as in "The Third Reich," since the Nazis saw their government as carrying on after the earlier Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire that existed before World War I). During WWII, this building got pretty much destroyed by bombing. In the 1960s, they partially refurbished the building before really making it what it is today in the 90s after German reunification and building a cool glass dome on top. When they were done fixing it up in 1999, it once again became the parliament's meeting place, but this time for the Federal Republic of Germany; it's still popularly known as the "Reichstag" though. 

We met a cute group of Spanish girls who were also tourists outside this building. They spoke (broken) English to us to ask if we could take their photo, and were relieved when we responded in Spanish. We gotta help our Spanish sisters out now and then. :)

After the Reichstag we made our way over to the Brandenburg Gate, where I somehow failed to take a decent picture of such an impressive monument! I blame the sun...

That night we had a hilarious Spanish meal in Berlin. We were staying at a Spanish-owned hotel. All their promotional materials were in English, Spanish, and German, and it was clear that they always started in Spanish and then translated to English, then German. It was like reading a game of telephone! 

The restaurant in the hotel had Spanish food, so we ordered some classics like patatas bravas (friend potatoes with spicy sauce), pan con tomate (bread with tomato spread), tortilla (potato-egg omelet), and some olives. The food wasn't really up to Spain standards (although the rest of the food in Berlin was delicious, with lots of international options missing in Ciudad Real and Italy), but it was nice to have some familiar things on our last night in Europe! 

Looking back at these photos, it seems like this all happened a really long time ago! It's hard to believe that in just a few months we've both found jobs, we have a great new apartment in Oakland, and are (pretty much) settled back in the Bay Area. I'm thinking about keeping up the blog to post photos of future trips - abroad and around Northern California. 

Next big trip coming up: India! We'll be there after Christmas for a couple weeks for a friend's wedding. So keep us on your RSS feed, we'll be back.

I'll leave you with one last picture, of the newest addition to the family, our nephew Owen Alexander. He was born on October 14th, and he is so precious! 

Berlin, Round 1

After leaving Italy, we made our way to Berlin for a few days. We met our friends Paoli, Danny, Sarah,  and Samuel, who were coming from London, New York, and Paris, all to hang out in Berlin together. Originally some of us had planned to go see Radiohead and Caribou in concert in Berlin, but the show got canceled because at an earlier concert in Toronto their light display fell and killed one of their crew. They rescheduled the show for September, but we won't be flying back to Berlin in a couple months just for one concert! At least we got our money refunded though, and still had an awesome time in Berlin. 

Since there were six of us, we decided to do an apartment rental through Airbnb. We stayed in this beautiful apartment in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, which ended up being extremely inexpensive split between us all. The four-person family who normally lives in this apartment have a huge record collection and a nice stereo set-up that was fun to use. Here's the living room: 

One day we went to the farmers market and picked up some produce for dinner. This kitchen is perfect for a big group dinner! 

There were three bedrooms in the apartment, all with very cute (half Ikea/half antique) decor. Here's the master bedroom: 

On our first day exploring, we ate lunch at this restaurant called Dolores, that serves "California gourmet burritos." We've figured out that it is generally a bad idea to eat any type of Mexican food in Europe (with a few notable exceptions in Barcelona and Madrid), but we had to try this place since it is modeled after the taquerias of the Mission District in San Francisco, where we lived before moving to Spain.



Inside the restaurant the walls are decorated with a public transit map of San Francisco, even showing Dolores Park, our old neighborhood hangout!

The food wasn't life-changing (it basically tasted like Chipotle, with a few more interesting sauces and serving Anchor Steam beer), but we were happy to have some recognizable form of American/Mexican food. Now that we're back home in the States, we're waiting till we get back to California before trying again. We need some Gilroy tacos! Here's me and Danny waiting in line; so excited to eat some burritos!

From most parts of central Berlin (which was part of East Berlin during the Communist rule in East Germany) you can see this gigantic TV tower, which was constructed in the 1960s and is the tallest building in Germany. Here's Sarah and Danny in front of the tower: 

Berlin is a pretty cool-looking city. In the part of town where we spent most our time, there are a lot of relatively new apartment buildings mixed with more historic ones (ours dated to the 1890s) and every once in a while churches, some of which are blackened from WWII bombings. Most of the boulevards are lined with big trees, and there are a lot of parks. This is a fairly typical street in Berlin; I snapped this photo on our way out to dinner one night when it was starting to storm: 

After dinner we went out to a few bars, the first of which is called White Trash Fast Food (gotta love those Europeans and their lack of political correctness). We went there to see a show featuring a surf-rock band from California that Paoli knew about. The band was good, and the inside of the venue was pretty silly. They have it decorated like a hipster T.G.I. Fridays - complete with red and white checkered table clothes, Chinese lanterns, fake pagoda facades, serving burgers and fries alongside fondue, and blended cocktails. What a mess!

After White Trash, we went to a club called Tresor where we met up with a friend of our French friend Sam.  She works at Tresor, so got us in for free, which was pretty nice. The "club" is basically just a giant warehouse with several floors of extremely loud techno music, fog machines, and lights. It was not my favorite scene, but when in Berlin, you kind of have to go to a massive techno club at least once.  On one of the higher up floors there was a balcony looking out into all the unused space of the building. It is crazy that a major European city has this much extra space to spare:

We didn't stay long at Tresor, followed it up by a party in what felt like a German Elks Lodge with DJs spinning old disco and new wave tunes, and eventually made our way home at about 4:30am, pretty tame for Berlin. The next morning we got up and went to the farmers market and tried Currywurst, which is a fried bratwurst sausage cut up on top of french fries with ketchup and curry powder. Invented in Berlin, Currywurst is a popular and delicious snack in Germany, and it's pretty cheap (about $3-4 for a fairly filling portion):

Later that afternoon, we walked around some more of Berlin. We went along the river and eventually end up near the remnants of the Berlin Wall. During summer it is usually really nice weather (while we were there it was sunny and thunderstorming on and off), and a lot of restaurants and bars along the river have cool outdoor seating, sometimes on the river, like this place called Watergate, which Will used to visit back when he lived here for a couple of summers:

It was pretty cool to see the Berlin Wall, which is now covered in murals and graffiti art. I didn't actually know that there were several layers of walls dividing East and West Berlin, but in some spots you can actually see two sets of walls with the "no man's land" buffer zone in between. 

Berlin was about what I expected it to be, especially after having heard some much about it from WP. The Germans we talked to in Berlin were all pretty nice, and for the most part spoke almost perfect English, which works out well for people like me who automatically respond in Spanish when asked a question in any foreign language. It's "ja" not "si," d'oh! 

From Berlin, we headed up to northern Germany to the island of Rügen, where people are a lot less cosmopolitan (less English spoken) and the scenery is gorgeous. After our trip up to Rügen we spent one day back in Berlin, and that's when we went to see the more iconic tourist attractions. More on that part of the trip in a couple posts!