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!
9:02 AM
Betsy said…
Looks like so much fun! We miss you guys!! Love from Betz and Bulk
1:07 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mohr im Hemd

Image
I finally got up the nerve to try my own Mohr im Hemd. This was the dish that we always ordered if we found it on the menu. It translates as "The Moor and His Shirt" which is so politically incorrect that it isn't easy to find, even though it is a traditional Viennese dish. It is a steamed pudding, like the Christmas dessert I grew up on and it is very moist and very chocolate, though not as sweet as an American dessert. It was successful enough that Rob had me make it twice more in the same weekend. Happily, after learning how to make it, I feel less guilty about eating the stuff. How often does that happen? Here is the recipe I used, as opposed to the top secret family recipe that I don't even have, or the recipe from my Austrian cookbook that asks for 'gratified butter': MA's Mohr im Hemd 3 bread rolls, crusts removed and cubed 1 c milk 3/4 c unsalted butter 1/4 c sugar 8 oz best and darkest chocolate you can find 8 eggs 1/2 c sugar 1/2 c walnuts, ...
Read more

Blue and Gold Cake Contest

Image
Have we mentioned that Rob is now the Cubmaster? It was something of a shock, but it has been great for getting the boys excited about scouting (and let's face facts: Rob and I are lukewarm at best on a paramilitary, homophobic, psuedo-Hitler Youth organization, so our boys were destined to embrace it wholeheartedly from the start). One of the first arguments that Rob ever won with his parents was over scouting. They had moved into a neighborhood with no other kids his age, and so his eagle project would have been almost entirely solo (with some help from his younger brother). He proposed that instead of getting his eagle, he work towards becoming a Sterling Scholar in foreign languages at OHS. His parents finally agreed, and he did make Sterling Scholar at OHS, and went on to become the statewide foreign language Sterling Scholar. So my husband is one merit badge and an eagle project shy of his eagle, which just so happens (Freudianly?) to be exactly the same as my brother, Mr. T...
Read more

To Nerdly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before....

Image
A Halloween Guest Blog from the Professor Because we are evil to the core, your humble Professor and Mary Ann stay up nights thinking of all the different ways we can ruin our kids socially. We eat vegetarian fare from the Moosewood Cookbook, we listen to Brahms and Faure and Stawberry Switchblade (only MA on that last one), and we do not do TV. Our final fiendish plot (inspired by Michael Chabon and Dr.Who) is to put our kids in our own nosatalgia warp. Instead of exposing them to Avatar (loathesome) and Justin Bieber (what the @#$% ?), we hook them up with Bill and Ted (Prof), The Scarlet Pimpernel (MA) and, as can be seen in these Halloween shots, we have introduced them to Star Trek. Awkward Family Photos, here we come! It all started with Sebi. He is half Vulcan, it seems, and on any given day he already looks uncannily like the young Spock in the most recent Star Trek movie. All he needed for the full transition: some ears, of course, and the appropriate haircut by our favorit...
Read more