Support Your Local Palace

The adults came home to this:
. . . which meant it was time to get out of the house. We waited for the bus nearly 20 minutes, but we've learned that a spoonful of sugar makes the traveling go round. Rob bought five small cones and we were ready to roll . . .
. . . to Schloss Charlottenburg, our own neighborhood palace. Actually our neighborhood is named after it. But before it was built for Sophie-Charlotte in the late 1800's, the neighborhood was called Lietzow, just like our lake, Lietzensee.
We'd been here before with the kids and this is what they did back then: run over all the brick paths.
Like Potsdam from last Saturday, it has lots of ornate baroque and rococo rooms inside and a formal french garden surrounded by a woodland. We didn't take a tour this time.
The whole family. Isn't it ironic how there are so many of us, but if you want a family picture you've got to have a friend to take it?! Thanks, Curtis, for getting all of us, the palace, and our heads in the frame!
This is the back view. It was part of Rob's area while he served here and he remembers coming and standing on this spot [20+] years ago. He would never have been able to imagine bringing such a large and unruly family back here!
These three walked around imagining new ways of killing people. Isn't that what you do at baroque palaces?
Tomas has broken up our boys' current summer dynamic (dumb comment/smack/pinch/wail/kick/pout/time out and repeat).
And I just need to point out that this trip was brought to you in large part by this fabulous girl. It would not be possible to live here and travel so much if she weren't willing to sleep on a bed in the living room, share a closet with three brothers, go grocery shopping at Kaiser's, babysit, heft the stroller when Papa isn't around and generally help out in any way she can.
Which is why I let her dye her hair purple.
You won't quite believe it (my feet didn't and neither did my sleeping son, Joss) but then we caught a bus and stopped by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. This was a large Protestant church in West Berlin that was bombed out in WWII. The tower has been left destroyed as a memorial and this new church built alongside it with a separate bell tower.
Everything in Berlin gets a nickname because they are a casual, snarky and irreverent people and these three are called the "hollow tooth" (bombed out tower), "lipstick" (the new belfry), and the "powder box" (the new chapel, seen above). From outside I don't think it looks like much, but I find the inside very moving.
This is one of the mosaics found on the inside of the hollow tooth. It is depicting the wedding of some Hohenzollerns. They are a great german royal family that is important both to Berlin and the area around Tubingen where we'll go next month.

Comments

Frau Magister said…
Yay purple hair!
Betsy said…
Looks like so much fun! We miss you guys!! Love from Betz and Bulk

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