Summer 2011

July 24, 2011

Hi all,

RANAD here (as in Rob, Aviva, Noah, Aaron, and Diane writing together). Here's our first instalment of our Europe 2011 trip blog.

It all started off perfectly; we arrived at the airport with our bags packed, our passports and etickets booked, and our snacks prepared. We hadn't yet paid the cab driver, when Aviva turns to exclaim, "Oh my G-d, I left my costume at home!!" (she needs the costume for her upcoming performance in August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival). So there was no choice; we had to go back and get it. While Rob and Aviva raced back to the house with the cabbie who should consider driving in the Indie-500, Diane, Aaron and Noah checked themselves in, anxiously firing off multiple texts to Rob and Aviva. At the house, Aviva dashed in and out in record time and, $183 later (the cabbie had no mercy), the two made it back to the airport two minutes before last-call for check-in. Meanwhile Aaron and Noah's backpacks needed to be wrapped in enormous plastic bags and sealed with duct tape, Diane and the boys tried several wrapping maneuvers, which we called "the mummy", "the parka", and "the birthday present".

On the plane we stopped in Quebec City. Thanks to a really awesome flight attendant, and beyond all post-911 odds, Aaron and Noah got to go to the cockpit and meet the pilot, co-pilot and crew! Aaron got to sit in the co-pilot's seat - it was way more comfortable than our seats. They showed the boys all the bells and whistles and answered some questions that Aaron had about flight school.

Berlin - We got to the apartment, which we would have never found had the cabbie not shown us - it was in a separate building called the "gartenhaus" behind the building with the street number on it - apparently this was evident to him by looking at the key. We realized we needed food for the next day, so Rob and Aviva went to get groceries at the local Kaisers, however, it was closed, so they brought back Vietnamese food instead....our first real German meal.

Our first full day in Berlin we went to the Jewish Museum. Designed by Daniel Liebeskind, it gives the history of Jews in Germany over the last 2000 years - including, but not exclusively about the Holocaust. What was perhaps the most interesting was the end, where they had the stories of current Jews living in Germany, a generation or two after the Holocaust. One in particular was of an Israeli guy who moved to Berlin in the 1980s as a young man and experienced preferential treatment from his housemates, which he enjoyed until he realized this preferential treatment was out of German guilt.

Dinner was at a pan-south-asian restaurant, where they told us that we should buy bottled water as their tap was rusty. The restaurant was uber modern and slick - hard to imagine that only the tap was rusty. At the next table were two transvestites who left half-way through. We told Aaron about them, but he didn't look till the second half of the meal; when two women were seated there. For Aaron, these were very convincing-looking transvestites.

Next day we went on a Hop-on-Hop-off bus tour in the rain (Berlin Circle Tours). They managed to make a pretty fascinating city unbelievably dull, by monotonously announcing random facts with no historical or cultural context. We hopped off at the Sony Centre where we dined on our picnic lunch in a back corridor, underneath an escalator as there is nowhere to sit and eat if it's raining. And as always in Europe, toilets aren't free, hard to get used to when what you pay for is sandpaper tissue. The Sony Centre is this gorgeous new indoor-outdoor complex in Pottsdamer Platz, which was formerly no-man's land when the Berlin Wall was standing.

We also got off at Checkpoint Charlie Museum and learned all about the Berlin Wall. The museum is a bit haphazard, and the biggest problem is that it ends with no detail about how the Wall came down and beyond. However, we learned a lot and had really interesting discussions about The Cold War.

Quick note about Starbucks. We feel we have given them plenty of money over the years and so we feel absolutely no guilt about going in there, hopping on their free wifi, downloading maps, finding restaurants, and then going elsewhere to have our coffees. We're in Europe after all; there's better coffee out there!

On our last day in Berlin we'd had enough with the museums and tours. We rented bikes and rode all over the city. It's an amazing city to bike in, with lots of marked bike lanes. In particular, we cycled along the Spree (river in Berlin, pronounced Shpray) and went to what remained of the Berlin Wall (a couple hundred meters), where various graffiti artists were commissioned to do murals. It's amazing how much more you can like a city when the sun is shining and you're not listening to a boring recorded tour guide.

Quest for the perfect German pastries: Based on our previous experience 11 years ago in Worms (another city in Germany....really), Rob has been on a mission each visit to rediscover the perfect hazelnut-chocolate butter tart, but to no avail. We have tried valiantly, sampling pastries from a variety of bakeries here. Last night we bought four different cakes and ate them all! Ok, they were small cakes. The poppy seed one came close, but not quite. Oh well.

Now we're on a train to Prague. The train is over-booked but we have reserved seats. Ha Ha Ha, as if anyone actually cares. En route to our seats, Noah asked Rob, "What if a little old lady is sitting in our seats?" To which Rob answered, "We'll show no mercy and kick her out!" When we arrived at our reserved seats, there was, you guessed it.....a little old lady and her little old husband, and...another little old lady with a CANE and her little old husband, all sitting in our seats. And no, we were incapable of kicking them out, though we really wanted to. But we did kick out the young man from the 5th seat, and we are now huddled in the aisles on our way to Prague.

As for being prepared for Prague, we know two words. We know how to say "yes" and "no", but we keep getting them confused.

We'll write more soon. Love,
RANAD

We're off

It's true, RANAD is off on perhaps her biggest adventure ever. Updates will be coming shortly. Now we have to pack,
Love,
RANAD