The Professor and Mary Ann

Friday night, everyone but me went to a basement off Kurfurstendamm where there is the worlds largest model train setup. It is in large part a miniature Berlin with some fantasy extras. Every twenty minutes there is a "night" and the lights come on and there was a thunder storm. Every half hour planes take off and land at the miniature airport. Here is a wee Reischstag, complete with a bunch of tourists piling out of a bus. You can see the little Brandenburg gate behind it at the end of the line of trees. Three guys are kept busy in a control room making all of the trains go and not crash into each other. Here's a detail of the Zoo train station, which is absolutely accurate. We switch busses here all the time, and the only thing missing in the model is the dirt and your standard-issue mind-altered inner-city train station person. They stayed for over an hour and everyone loved it, but no one topped Sebi's enthusiasm. Every time he saw a train he'd shout ...

On Thursday, Mom and I had a marathon on Museum Island. That's right, those organized Germans have put all of their museums together on an island. I don't know how the plan originated, but I would think that it stems from a desire to keep all of their tourists contained somewhere out of the way. Tourists are, by definition, lost. If you put them all on an island, they are bound to find each other, even if they can't find anything else. We started in the Pergamon Museum and these are the Ishtar gates from Babylon. They are glazed baked bricks and were painstakingly reconstructed and recreated here. It's a breathtaking room, but both of us were curious about the daisy motif. We don't think of daisies as the flower of the Babylonian Empire. Is that just us? Do daisies grow in Babylon? Upstairs was an exhibit of Islamic art, which took us back to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. We agreed that it was one of our favorite places. All of it was beautiful and intricate and...

Rob got me into a one month German class here this week. It is at the Goethe Institute, the government-sanctioned place to learn German, which is also where our BYU students are taking their language classes. It's down in the Schoenenviertel (the pretty district/the Jewish quarter) which is both funky and upscale since reunification. Everyone is terribly hip, there's a great shop with 70's retro housewares next door, and a restaurant down the street called "Foodball" where everything is a spherical edible (or is everything an edible spherical?). It looks like all the patrons are gnawing on hacky sacks. It is a fun place to be, but now that it's gotten cold and is pitch black when we leave at 6:00pm, it is sort of spooky. The television tower looms above, the trams squeal by, clouds hang low overhead and one can see how easy it would be to go E.T.A. Hoffmann on Berlin. Very Edgar Allen Poe. We meet for four weeks from 1:15-5:45pm and that is tough on the sit...

When we decided to come over here in the fall, I thought that I was getting out of two of the major holidays: Halloween and Thanksgiving. It would appear now that I was wrong on both counts. The kids were sick for the ward Halloween party and we didn't have costumes anyway, so I thought I was off the hook; then on Monday Maddie's friends were all talking about what they were going to dress up as and they got a reprieve from homework for the event, so I folded and went out and bought costumes for all the kids. Since neither of us had our phones, Rob bought costumes too -- it was sort of a gift-of-the-magi moment. As much as anything, I did it for continuity of memory. "I was a tiger, then I was a chicken, then I was a bat . . ." Maddie got just what she wanted: a scary costume with makeup and a stand-up collar. She played the role quite well. Will combined Rob's ghost costume with my skeleton costume to be whatever that makes. Sebastian was the cutest purple-eare...

On Saturday, we all went to the Zoo, which is right in downtown Berlin. It was opened in 1844 with a gift of animals from Frederick the ?'s animal garden and menagerie. Now there are 14,000 animals in a leafy setting. I think it is the prettiest zoo I've been to. The chickens (yes, chickens) have a half-timbered chicken house, and the giraffes live in a mosaic mosque with minarets. Some other beast has a thatched roof. This was a black-eared marmoset. We were enjoying them running around and then realized that there was a wee baby, smaller than your thumb, on the back of one of them. We also loved the baby chimpanzee, but decided not to put that picture up, because it looked so much like a little girl in our old ward. I love our camera! I love the hippos in Berlin! We arrived just at feeding time, but this was afterward, when the hippo was just showing off for Rob. They are a favored animal here, and they have a great big hippodome where you can watch them above and below wa...

My friend's husband is a microlender who often uses the phrase "preserve the asset" to mean that he wants her to take care of herself. My parents are both having foot problems, the boys are both having ear problems, and Maddie has bronchitis as we found out from our visit to a cross-eyed doctor on Thursday. So we are very into preserving our assets right now (what's left of them!). On Wednesday, Grandma Shumway and I went up to the neighborhood palace, Charlottenburg, and walked around the grounds. It was a beautiful and unusually warm day and I was trying to get used to our camera again. There is a small French garden just behind the palace, but most of the rest of it is wild, or an English garden with rivers and bridges. Then my parents rented a nice Volvo and Rob and I drove them down to Potsdam. This is a picture of the Jagdschloss Glienicke or the hunting palace Glienicke. Another gorgeous day. This is the neo-Gothic Schloss Babelsberg which was designed by Ka...

Right now several big buildings and monuments are lit up at night, probably to prolong tourism since it is getting dark at about five now and we're losing four minutes of daylight a day (about two minutes more than most of you). We liked the Brandenburg Gate and we are thrilled that our replacement camera finally arrived, so we were trying it out in low light. The Grandparents Shumway rented a car yesterday and so Rob drove them through town, then out to Potsdam where we had a whirlwind through-the-park-and-step-out-at-the-palaces tour that lasted until sunset. Then we went home and switched babysitter and drove back to see the lit up things from the Reichstag to the Unter den Linden Opera house and had dessert at the Opera Palace Cafe. This is the New Palace in Potsdam which is incredible, but off the more beaten San Souci path. Grandma Shumway brought lots of Halloween decorations and the kids had great fun putting them up. Here Will and Grandpa enjoy Homestarrunner.com and ot...

For those of you concerned, the Shumways arrived today on time and in good shape. Good enough that they survived several hours of incessant talking and enthusiastic bouncing by their grandchildren and a dinner of wurst and kartoffel puree. Now they are off to their own apartment (in our building) with more African knickknacks and animal prints than you ever thought they could withstand. Sweet dreams on the savannah!

Here are the current McFarland family vehicles. The stroller is for Sebastian when he deigns to ride in it, and for all of our sightseeing stuff when he doesn't. The other thing is a shopping cart so we can load up all the heavy groceries and not pull our arms out on the walk home. Rob said today that it's the best 10 euros we've spent since we got here. If you're not Sebastian or a grocery, you're on your own two feet.

This post is dedicated to Kathryn Isaak, who didn't get to one of these during her short stay in Berlin. This is a public restroom. Like lots of WCs in Europe, you must pay to use it. Maddie is navigating the sensors for the faucet, soap, and hand dryer here. The difference is that this is entirely automatic and self-cleaning. It gives each customer up to 20 minutes and then it cleans itself (unless you are handicapped, and then you get 40 minutes). The toilet seat rotates around and gets cleaned, the floor gets cleaned, etc. There is space age music, which I wasn't expecting. Usually there are women at each restroom who keep it clean and you give them some coins in exchange. I would think that the union of toiletten damen would be up at arms about this, because it might threaten job security if robots were doing what they do, but so far I have only seen five in Berlin, so perhaps it isn't an issue.

Today was one of those days that we couldn't have planned, and if we'd planned it, it would never have worked out. We had no plan this morning. I scrubbed the bathroom floor and Rob went shopping, but not only did he do the family shopping, he invited Maddie and Will to come with him. This boggles my mind. I would rather have minor dental work done than go shopping with my children, not least because Will always talks me into something overpriced and unnecessary. Rob came home with a box of Frucht Tiger, which is a juice drink of dubious nutritional value, so I think he got off light. I will note here that Maddie and Will have been playing beautifully for the last week. I don't know what changes, but now they will go off for hours and play royalty or rescue heroes and I'll see them both sitting fully-clothed in the bathtub making up stories. Yesterday Maddie found a "chip" which she used to determine Will's makeup. She said that Will is "one percent...

So this week has seen yet another crisis that took up too much time. It would bore you, but it is important to know that we are still scrubbing bathroom floors and grocery shopping and standing in long communist-era lines and dodging doo-doo on the sidewalks. Unlike when we have a stressful situation at home, we can escape here and let Sarah play poker with the kids while we go out to a concert at the Schauspielhaus. This was a building designed by Schinkel (you will remember that he is the architect/decorator/set designer who put his neo-classical/neo-gothic mark on Berlin). It sits in the middle of the Gendarmenmarkt between the French cathedral and the German cathedral and the whole plaza was memorialized in a story called "My Cousin's Corner Window" written by ETA Hoffmann, whom you know because he also wrote the story upon which the Nutcracker was based (and while we are way off topic, you should know that the story is a lot more bizarre and has a lot fewer corps de...

Now that the kids are back in school, learning to write their ones and sevens strangely, Rob and Sebi and I tried to get in another palace on Wednesday morning. Weather here was still gorgeous and we rode down to Wannsee, which is this lake, as seen through the pergola. This was a Venetian/Byzantine 'curiosity' on the palace grounds. It was right next to the Orangerie where the head gardener let us peek in as they were bringing all of the palms and citrus in for the winter. She said that it was state of the art for the 1830's and had radiators inside to keep the plants warm. Rob and Sebastian checking out the perpetually spitting lions. This shot shows the historical pieces that they bought up and hung on the walls as decoration. This alone explains why Athens looks like it does these days (and, by extension, what anyplace might look like after a few centuries of tourism). This palace is right next to the Berlin city limits, and the bridge (Glienicker Brucke) where the e...

Last Sunday, we took a walk next to our house. I couldn't believe it, but we are only two blocks away from a garden colony and the S-Bahn tracks. They're hidden behind some apartment buildings, but I have never heard the trains going by. The kids were very excited to watch the trains go in and out of the station, and they tried to get the drivers to wave to them as they left. Eastbound drivers are more likely to wave from our short experience. On unused train rights of way, people can buy leases and have a small garden plot which is called a Schrebergarten. These had obviously been around for a long while and most of them had a teeny house too. This allows the trains to get rent money out of the real estate while they're not using it, and makes it easy to use it when they need to. It also lets people get gardens and second homes and the land looks a lot better than it would if it were left unattended. The garden colony had a lot in common with our neighborhood in Grandvi...