I see dead people

As I'm walking around the office in Eagan (Minnesota), I've noticed something more and more the longer I've been gone. I still recognize a lot of people in the building after four years, but they've forgotten about me. It's like I'm a ghost. As I pass someone I know and wave or say "hi," I can tell they have this moment where they're completely clueless as to who I am or why I look familiar to them (but with more gray hair). If they figure it out, it's usually after I've passed them.

I'm trying to be a little more careful not to throw people off these days, but it still happens from time to time.

Lindsey's baptism

Lindsey was baptized today. I baptized her in German but did the confirmation in English. And then, of course, we ate, which makes for a perfect day.

Berlin report

For this trip, rather than breaking it down day by day, I'll do most of it at once. Maybe we can convince Stace to do a separate entry about the Third Reich tour that she and Tanner took.

But first, Legoland. We spent a day there and had the expected amount of fun. (Read that however you will.) Stace loved the restroom signs.

Here's a pretty cool Lego rendition of the Swiss town of Lucerne.

The next day, it was on to Berlin, where we took a bike tour. Here's Checkpoint Charlie.

And here's a marker showing where the wall used to be.

There's not much of the wall left, but here's one of the sections.

Here's the site of Hitler's bunker, where he committed suicide. The government doesn't want to open it up or even mark the spot for fear that it will become a Neo-Nazi shrine.

This is the Holocaust Memorial.

And, of course, here's the famous Brandenburg Gate. It was quite something to imagine the scene there twenty years ago when the wall came down.

The next day was really, really cold. Here's the Berlin Cathedral. (You all remember how much I like wandering around old cathedrals, right?)

Here's the Reichstag, sort of the German equivalent of Capitol Hill. We later walked up in the dome and took a tour.

Here's a view from the dome.

In this picture, you can see the Brandenburg Gate on the left and the Holocaust Memorial in the background.

At the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, there were many illustrations of the ingenious ways that people managed to make it out of East Berlin. On the other hand, there was this reminder of the many people who didn't.

It was a good trip. It could have been about fifteen degrees warmer, but we still had fun.

Und jetzt sind wir in Zug

We're back from Berlin. It was unusually cold--in fact, we spent Saturday night eating dinner near the Brandenburg gate watching the snow fall. It was a good trip; we only wish it would have been about fifteen degrees warmer.

We did something different this time: bike tours. All of us took a bike tour on Friday to see some of the sights of Berlin, and then Stace and Tanner took another tour on Sunday that focused on sites specific to the Third Reich and Nazi Germany, something in which she's always been interested. (I just re-read that last sentence and realized again how screwed up the English language is. Try to explain to me why both "sights" and "sites" work in that sentence.)

Pictures to come soon. Next up: Stockholm and St. Petersburg, and then on to Lakeville!

Am Dienstag fahren wir nach Berlin

Here's another last: The last spring break trip somewhere in Europe. We're heading to Berlin tomorrow, although we won't actually make it until Thursday due to a little side trip to Legoland. Next year for spring break, we'll be choosing between locales such as Fargo, Rapid City, and Wisconsin Dells. It doesn't quite feel the same.

It will be nice to be in a place where we have some idea of what's going on. None of us is fluent in German, but we do okay at navigating in a German-speaking country, unlike being in Egypt or Poland, for example.

Cover your ears

This place has really been tough on the ears lately. Over the past few weeks, we've noticed Tanner's voice cracking from time to time as it starts to change. (Heaven help us all.) Now, to make matters even worse, he's come down with a cold. It's awful. He can't utter a sentence without spanning about four octaves in the space of ten words. He's worse than a Garth Brooks song.

For the sake of our sanity, we've requested that he not speak until he turns 17 or until he gets over his cold, whichever comes last.

More "lasts"

Well, this past weekend saw us doing two more things for the last time: Stace and I had lunch at a ski resort in the Alps for the last time, and we all drove to an obscure part of Germany to play with monkeys at a monkey park for the last time. (Okay, honestly, that was also the first time to do the monkey thing, but I'm pretty sure that it was the last.)