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!