What’s a “warte”?  It’s a lookout tower. I prefer to call it a Rapunzel Tower. And guess what? We have one about a 20 minute walk from our apartment!

Libby and I decided to find this tower and see if it really existed. We hiked up the road behind our house. (It’s all uphill!) We came to a lovely park with all the lovely trees and bushes and grass you’d hope to see. The grass here is SO green! It’s like it was Photoshopped. 

 

We came to a playground, but still, no Rapunzel tower. 

 

Then we saw a building. Could this be it? It appeared to be a prayer shrine thing for Saint Barbara. You could light candles and such.

 

It had some pretty views of Linz, so maybe?

 

But the path kept going on, so we did. And we were rewarded. There it was!

     

 

We climbed the spiral staircase

 

 

and were rewarded with a wonderful, yet cloudy view of Linz. 

 

And then it started raining.  So we went home and planned to come back another day. 

Which we did.

       

 

On our second trip, we discovered the exercise trail and had fun with that!

Station One–Hug a Tree

 

 

Station Two–Run through Swinging Tires

 

Station Three–Hang Upside Down and Determine if “Thumbs Up” Should Be “Thumbs Down”

 

Station Four–Ride a Seatless Unicycle

    

 

Also, just in case you were wondering, Austrians don’t know how to take turns and wait in line. Not at all. 

It’s Spring! Austria didn’t get weeks of 70 and 80 degree weather like PA did. We have had a slow-and-steady sort of spring here. And now, it’s pretty!

The flowers are starting to bloom.

 

      

 

The trees and bushes are wearing flowers.

      

 

And even the Nightlock is ready for action! (ha ha)

 

The trees are happy it is spring!

 

(Some of the houses look like they are ALWAYS ready for spring!)

 

Libby and I have enjoyed several walks. 

      

 

Happy Spring to YOU!

This was the first Easter my family has not all been together. I am so glad my mom had Nathan and David over for lunch and overdosed them on candy and all that.  

The kids woke up to their Easter plates. Meager, yes, but that’s how it is in healthy Austria.

 

When we lived in England, we didn’t have basket for Easter, so I used plates. We liked it so well that we do it every year now. 

 

Even James got a treat. 

 

Then it was off to lunch at the Moores. They are a delightful American family we met at church.  They invited two other American families over, and we had such a wonderful time visiting and eating and sharing stories. 

 

        

 

And it snowed! When we were in England for Easter, it snowed then, too. It’s like a tradition now.

 

This is the closest I got to a family picture this Easter. Oh, well.  

 

21 more days of European adventures!

The second museum we attended was the Neues Museum. Berlin has loads of museums, but we picked this one because it had Egyptian stuff. And it’s always cool to look at mummies.

This museum, like the Pergamon, is on Museum Island in Berlin. I am not sure if it is still a literal island or not, but the Spree River runs by it, at least on one side. They seemed to be overly protective in this museum. For example, we were on the landing of the stairs, and Michael’s had brushed a column (not an exhibit, a column on the stairs), and a museum person came over and told him not to touch it.  Weird. 

Anyhow, here’s what we saw!

This is actual, Egyptian papyrus preserved. 

  

 

 These are the death masks of some random Egyptian women. 

   

 

 

Obligatory Egyptian cat idol photo

 

 

I liked this one because instead of just sitting side-by-side, they are affectionate in their pose. Or at least she is. 

   

 

A number of the artifacts still had the original paint, which was neat. 

  

    

Hee hee

The BIG DEAL thing at the Neues Museum was the bust of Nefertiti.  They had two guards when I was there. They keep it in this room.

Absolutely NO photos were allowed, so I swiped all my images from the internet.

       

Why is she such a big deal? Well, she was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. What I find interesting, though, is she was the wife of Pharaoh Akenaten. Who is that guy? Well, you may not have known that one Egyptian pharaoh decided that there was only one, true god. They called him “Aten” or “The Sun Disc.” He had his people destroy their polytheistic gods and shrines and all and worship one god.  After he died, the people went back to their old ways of worship, but I found it fascinating that this one man said there was only one god.  Also, Tutankahmen, King Tut, was Akenaten’s son.  Nefertiti was not King Tut’s mother, though. She had six daughters. 

There were also Greek and Roman things there. 

Plato? Socrates? Moron! (I know it's not an exact quote...)

 

 

This sculpture was called “The Face of a Barbarian.” I liked it. 

 

I saw these pots and said, “Oh, they look like they have faces and belly buttons!

 

    

Then I realized they were called "Anthropomorphic Pots." Duh.

 

There was also some Middle Ages stuff. 

Dead people tomb

 

And this was cool. 

 

They dug up this old church and found over 100 pots in the floor in a stytem of channels and chambers with the open part to the top. They also found them in the walls with the open part facing the center of the church.  They figured out (being intelligent archaeologists and also because someone wrote about it in a medieval document) that these jars were a medieval sound system!  

We were told that THE museum to visit in Berlin was the Pergamon Museum. I expected a standard museum full of standard museum stuff. And, yes, there were places like that in this museum. But I was surprised.

The museum got its name because someone in the late 1800s noticed that people were hacking up limestone and burning it to make whatever it is that you get from burning limestone. It took him a lot of time and letters, but finally a German archaeologist came to Turkey and saved the rest of this huge altar. It had a giant frieze of the Greek gods battling the Titans.  They built the museum to hold the treasures and named it after the Greek town. 

I am not sure what the early museum holding the treasures looked like. It must have been inferior because they tore it down. This latest building is a keeper, though. They built the museum to hold them life-sized!

 

Okay, that’s not 100% true. This is the room where the altar was displayed. They wrapped the frieze around the walls and made the columns only about quarter-sized. But it was still really impressive! 

 

The next room DID have a a real-size thing. It was a market gate from Miletus.

 

That was really neat, and it was exceptionally fancy, even for ancient-times market gates. There were even some advertisement carved into it, said the audio guide. A barber and a few others had written their names, but I couldn’t find the ancient words to take a picture. 

 

 

 

The room after that had a spacious feel. It should have. Look how high the ceiling was!

 

The room was laid out with a mosaic tile and a statue. I thought the floor would be the neatest point. 

The audio guide told the story of the gazillions of little tiles that went into making this floor. And they were TINY tiles. Take a Tylenol and cut it in thirds. That’s about the average size of the tiles. My favorite part was that the floor maker signed his work in a fun way.

It looks like someone dropped a piece of paper on the floor and it is blowing away, but it is all in tile.  

But, it turned out that for me, the floor was not the best part. It was this statue.

What’s the big deal? Well, Homeschool Moms. Did you ever read Theras and His Town by Caroline Dale Snedeker when you were teaching Greece? Remember little Athenian Theras and his great love for the statue of Athena in the city of Athens? Well, this is it! This is Theras’ Athena!  The audio guide said that is is a Roman copy of the now-destroyed original. It was gold and gleaming white when made, they said. 

I wish I had the book with me so I could quote it and how Theras loved the face of the good and wise goddess. But that’s just literature. I’d rather praise our good and wise God!

Speaking of Bible things, the next thing we saw was the Ishtar Gate. What’s that? It’s the main gate in Babylon during Nebuchadnezzar’s time!

  

 

Yes, THE Nebuchadnezzar. Maybe Daniel walked under this archway? Maybe he supervised workman making it?

Below is an inscription from the gate written by Nebuchadnezzar II. I don’t know what it says. 

 

 

Lions were the royal symbol, and there were lots of them. But no one mentioned the daisies. What was with that?  There were lots of them everywhere.

    

 

Next, we saw some Assyrian stuff. 

I didn’t take many pictures because I was disdainful. We saw these two Assyrian lion-like creature things. I said, “Hey, those look just like the ones in the British Museum!” Then, I read that they were copies of the ones in the British Museum. I felt that the British Museum was superior on all things Assyrian, so I didn’t take any more pictures in the Assyrian room. 

I did take pictures of something that intrigued me. At first, I took the picture because the two guys were bowing down to pen and paper. I didn’t know they had ancient gods of pen and paper.

 

Then, the audio guide went on to explain that the two people in the image are identical. Therefore, they believe they are the same person. First the person is standing, then kneeling. It’s the first cartoon strip or animation or whatever you might want to call it ever recorded!

 

I have totally forgotten what this is, but it was also big. Look! There is James standing in front of it to prove that this…carved stone thing was really big!

 

The third part of this museum was devoted to Islamic art. As you may or may not know, Islam forbids making a person or animal in their art because it smacks of idol worship. I was surprised to see that very early Islamic art was similar to Roman art with the figures and all. It quickly changed to what you would expect.

 

        

Soon, we came to Rachel and Michael’s favorite part of any museum!

 

But I was looking forward to seeing more!

What visit to Berlin would be complete without messing about with the government?  We thought ours would not be, so we registered online to be able to tour the Reichstag, the German Parliament.  We had to leave the apartment at 7:45 am to have enough time with all our train travel to get there for our 9 am visit. Libby was feeling pretty horrible after her encounter with the concrete slab, so she stayed limping around the apartment while we did our tour.

The building was built in 1894. There was a big fire in 1933, and it was pretty badly damaged by WW2 bombs.  They sort of patched it up, but they didn’t bother really rebuilding it properly until German reunification in 1990. In 1999, the building as it is today was finished.  

 

Above the main doors is the inscription, “Dem Deutschen Volke,” which of course means, “Dem Dutch Folks.” (Or maybe it means, “To the German People.”)

And now, I wish to share an incredibly embarrassing story with you.

Hearken back to the summer of 1985 (oh shush, those of you not-yet-born!). I was a fifteen year old from Curwensville, PA. My knowledge of the world was rather limited. My boyfriend (we went to the Prom, we dated, I can use that term, right?) went to Germany for a month or so over the summer. He came back with a book of beautiful views Germany (which I believe was called Beautiful Views of Germany) and a lovely necklace in a box. On the box was this:

 

My mom looked at him and said, “Oh, what does that mean?”  

Arrogantly stupid me piped up, “Oh, is that like Disneyland or something?” 

He looked very pained. “No, that’s ‘Germany’ in German. That’s the symbol of their country.” 

I felt very stupid. I still feel very stupid about it. 

 

Okay, back to present day! 

You may have wondered what I meant by “registered” to tour. Since this is a working government building, you must register online with name, address, and all that. Then, you choose a time to come. We arrived at our time, had our names checked off a list, passports verified, and we went through airport-like security. Then they gave us official cards to wear. 

 

We went up in an elevator (with an elevator attendant even!), got audio guides, and were turned loose in the glass dome.  

The glass dome is pretty cool. It was built to replace the old, traditional dome that sadly had a bomb put through it.  It serves a number of purposes. 

1. It’s cool. Tourists like to visit it.

2. It’s a big window.

3. It has some sort of solar collection in it, so it also helps to heat or cool or whatever.

4. It’s symbolic. The glass on the top of the building shows the transparency of the German government. And, indeed, you can peer down the central part of the dome and see the parliament hard at work!

 

The audio guides were controlled by hidden sensors in the floor.

The kids figured it out. Whenever we’d cross a lighter gray panel, the audio guide would kick in and say, “Stop here and look for the building that looks like…”  That way, we got a good tour of Berlin’s rooftops. 

 

The audio guide also told us about the glass dome and the government. One neat thing about the dome is that the very top is open. So rain and snow can come right in. They are collected into a big funnel and then something is done with it. (I don’t know what, though. Maybe it was just a big rain gutter?)

 

 

Also, the sides of the building were open, so it was not a solid fishbowl or anything.   I am sure on a sunny, warm day, it is delightful. But on the cold, drizzly day we were there, it was pretty chilly. 

 

       

I think the Reichstag Dome is a good symbol for what the German government would like to be: transparent, looking to the future, and eco-friendly. It makes me wonder what would be a good architectural style or construction to symbolize me. Or what about to symbolize you? 

 

One of the outside places I wanted to visit in Berlin was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It’s really close to the Brandenburg Gate area, so it wasn’t much trouble to walk there. I knew it was outside, but I didn’t know what to expect. 

This is someone else’s picture of the memorial taken from above. 

It took a year and a half to build it, and it was officially opened to the public in 2005.  Wikipedia says, “It consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or stelae, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 7 ft 10 in long, 3 ft 1 in wide and vary in height from 8 inches to 15 feet 9 inches. According to Eisenman’s project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.”

 

In addition to what Eisenman wanted, they made a wicked cool hide and seek tag area!  

            

 

I was walking around through this orderly maze on an undulating pathway and thinking, “This would be an awesome place to play hide and seek!”  Then, I noticed my kids WERE playing hide and seek tag.  I felt guilty about this. Here we are, stupid Americans in a Holocaust memorial running around and playing tag. But then, I realized that is what every other visitor to the site was doing–teens, parents, grandparents, toddlers. And some were speaking German, so they weren’t all stupid Americans.  

The passages were narrow and it was impossible to see around the stelae. You had to stay in the center where the slabs were the tallest, because it’d be easy to find someone in the 8 inch high area. 

As the old saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets body checked into the side of a 15-foot tall concrete slab,” and that adage proved true for us. Libby and Rachel collided, and Libby’s leg and shoulder and side paid the price.  Poor thing, it hurt so much, she had tears in her eyes.  Some people wandered by and stared at her, probably wondering if she was overcome by the sorrow that the place should have evoked or if she had a bruise the size of a grapefruit forming on the side of her thigh.  I just let them wonder. 

Berlin is a huge city full of dining options. They even have a whole museum devoted to the Currywurst. (And it’s expensive to get into that museum!) What is a curry wurst? It’s a sausage cut into slices and seasoned with curry-flavored ketchup and is sold by street vendors. Apparently 800 MILLION servings of currywurst are sold in Germany a year. And it is now a tradition that every candidate for mayor in Berlin is photographed by a currywurst stand. 

 

Did I try a currywurst? Well, I don’t much like greasy sausage, am skeptical about street vendors, and I dislike the taste of curry. Plus, I never saw Ye Olde Currywurst Wagon. Otherwise, I might have tried one.  Maybe I could have gotten one near Checkpoint Charlie at this place?

 

Most train stations seemed to have a bakery in them. Libby and I were amused by the name of this chain of bakeries.

Yes, I realize it’s just “croissant” and “baguette” put together, but it sounds like something you’d need on a plane if you got sick to your stomach.  

 

Where did WE eat while in Berlin? I packed food, so we had breakfasts in our apartment. Lunch was always at the train station. Burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, whatever. So our only adventures were for supper. 

The first night, Michael suggested Burger King (again), but the girls and I protested. We wanted a REAL restaurant! With one thing and another (rain, Libby getting hurt (see next entry), and hunger), we went to the closest acceptable place. 

When my mom and I were on our cruise,  when we hit Mexico, we said, “Boy! I’m starved. I could go for a good sauerkraut and wienerschnitzel plate, and Casa de Playa looks like the PERFECT place for that!” (Serve that with a side of sarcasm…) So it seemed only fair that when we were in Germany, we’d eat Mexican.  

 

It turned out that those Berliners make a pretty mean chicken enchilada! Yum. 

 

The next day, we had some water in a yogurt shop that had basil growing in boxes on the table.

 

We should have had frozen yogurt because, as the wooden table proclaimed,

 

It turns out it was good that we didn’t eat any snacks because we found an ITALIAN restaurant for supper!

 

And it had the most delicious food, really and truly. I had penne pasta in a tomato cream sauce with mushrooms, chicken, and cherry tomatoes. It was one of those meals that is so good you keep thinking about and saying, “Remember that delicious (insert food item) we had in (insert place)?”

Germany also has good chocolate. I had this one, and I ate the entire thing on the train. Sadly, our local grocery carries Ritter chocolate, but not this berry and hazelnut kind that was amazingly delicious. 

 

But, just so you know, I still miss Jax. 

While going from busy subway station to busier subway station, Libby stopped walking and said, “What is that?” She bent down and picked up something from the ground. It was a 100 Euro note!  

We formed a little circle around her. “Is it real?” “I bet it’s fake!” But it looked to be the real deal. 

James and I looked at each other and looked around at the people thronging past us. There was no ticket booth nor information desk, and no one appeared to be looking for anything on the ground. 

“I guess it’s yours!” we said and headed on our way with a smiling daughter. 

 

 

What would you have done? 

The Berliner Dom, or Berlin Cathedral, is the first non-Catholic church we visited on our trip. It’s not properly a cathedral, as a true cathedral is the seat of a bishop. And if you aren’t Catholic, then it’s pretty hard to get a bishop’s seat.  Instead, it’s a “Supreme Parish and Cathedral Church” of the Evangelical Church.

Unlike many of the other churches we’ve seen, this one isn’t super-old. There were other churches, but they kept tearing them down and building new ones. The current building was built in 1905 in “high neo-renaissance style.” At the time, there was no separation of church and state, so the state paid the complete construction cost of 11.5 million Marks.  It is 374 feet long, 240 feet wide and 381 feet tall. People thought it was the Protestant “counterbalance” to the Vatican in Rome.

Like most things in Berlin, the cathedral did not escape damage during WW2. In 1940, the windows got blown out. In 1944, a bomb was dropped through the dome and caused a big fire. Reconstruction began in 1975, but it wasn’t completed until 1993. 

Of course, it was pretty inside.

 

 

The front had three stained glass panels. Here’s a close up of one.

I noticed that it differed from the Catholic churches we had visited. For one, the organ was on the left-side wall instead of opposite the main altar area.

     

For another, there were statutes of Calvin and Zwingli!  They were posed pointing to the Bible to emphasize “Solo Scriptura”–that it was the Word of God, not the traditions of church or man, that would show the way to salvation.

   

 

Above the doors you walk into was the “royal box.” This didn’t look very exciting. (it’s the area above and behind the girls.)

But we were able to go into the choir loft, which pretty much looked like the royal box. 

 

I don’t know what the name of this thing is. I’ve seen them in big churches before. But I wanted you to see the scale of things. That’s my six-foot tall son, Michael, standing next to it. (You can see the organ to the upper left in the picture.)

 

Even though “Dom” means “Cathedral,” it seems like it would have been mis-named if it didn’t have an actual dome. But it did!

  

The dome was decorated with mosaics depicting the Beatitudes.  I couldn’t get a very good picture of the mosaics. But there were lots of other mosaics in the church.  They had Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

 

 

And just a lot of pretties. 

  

 

In the cathedral, you could go up or you could go down. Up took you to the roof! There are 272 steps to get to the top of the cathedral. 

    

But the view from the roof was pretty cool. 

   

Someone made this heart in the grass. We weren’t sure how. Driving bikes through the yard?

On the way up, we passed a room full of broken things. It reminded me that this cathedral has gone through a lot. 

 

But, what happened if you went down those steps?  You’d wind up in the crypt. There were a lot of royal graves here. Remember the Hohenzollern family who were sent by the Pope to help protect Berlin from pirates? Well, they are the folks buried here.  

 

           

 

Now, my astute readers may be asking some questions about this crypt, such as, “If the place kept getting torn down, how old is this place?” Or, “What about that fire?” From the looks of things, this was a new crypt. And the audio guide said that a lot of the coffins (some marble, some tin, some wood) were damaged in the fire and were still being restored. 

Can you imagine if this were the basement of YOUR church? (Someone would probably want to put an AWANA circle down there.)

 

I don’t know why I liked this seated figure so well. I’m not sure who he is supposed to be, but to me, he was an angel saying, “Stop. Consider this cross. Consider these graves. Where are you going after you die? And how will you spend eternity?”