Sit Right Down and You'll Hear a Tale...

Today we met Tanta Elga, Grandma's other sister at the train station in Grunewald at 10:30 AM, it was raining. (Tanta, means Aunt in German). We took our longest/furthest ride into Germany on the train today into Alexanderplatz.  We were in the former East Germany. We looked at another outdoor exhibit/museum of the wall and the fall of Communism. 

As it began to rain harder, we went to a nearby tower, Fernsehturm (The Television Tower) and went to the viewing are top, 200 meters up, total height is 365 meters. There was a restaurant there and we had a cup of potato soup. I don't think Maddie and Blake liked it all that much, but the rest of us enjoyed it. While we were inside it stopped raining. 

As we ate, the dining room rotated a full 360 degrees (in about an hour). We then went next door to the oldest church in Berlin, founded in 1280, it burned in the 1500's and was rebuilt. It had the front tower installed in the 1790's. This was one of the things on my list to see. It was just an old church to the kids. The boys like this statue with the skull. This church is called Marienkirche, or St. Mary's church. 

We then went to another church, turned into a Museum. It was the equivalent of the First Baptist Church of Berlin, because this is where the king worshipped in an area in the back above the lay people, facing the alter. This place is called the Berliner Dome. The basement is full of tombs of royalty. Maddie wanted to see the inside, or she wasn't interested...so she wasn't interested. It was a fancy church, neither of these last two allow flash photography so I don't have many good pictures, and the last of our batteries ran out about this time. (Don't, worry we got two more packs on the way home today, so we are ok now, 16 Euro's later.)

As we were leaving the Berliner Dome it started to rain very hard, so we went back under the porch. As it let up we went to get on a boat that takes a tour of the city via the River Spree. As soon as we got in the Boat, which had a glass cover, it started to rain again, and they closed the cover.

Then as we started the tour it quit raining and the sun came out. It heated up very quickly. It was 100% humidity. The rest of the tour was a school class who was not listening and the two teachers kept clearing their throats, snapping their fingers, and finally yelling at them to shut up and listen (I don't speak German, but I know that's what she did.) Maddie said the cadence of the tour guide got on her nerves. The tour was in German, so the boys got to test their German, and I followed along in a guide book/map Tanta Elga had given me when we started out in the morning. When the long tour was over, we were ready to go eat. I told Maddie I would bring her back and we could do it again tomorrow.

We stopped at a cafe near the train station and the boys finally got to have the bratwurst and sauerkraut they have been wanting. Blake said the heck with sauerkraut, but he ate the sausage and potatoes. I don't know what I had, it was some sort of pork. G-man and I shared. Maddie said the heck with German food for now, she was having a hamburger.

Tanta Elga 5-28