No More Relatives! Finally A Day To Ourselves!

A week of visiting in Berlin. The kids are tired of being sent off to Find Something To Do while mom and dad engage in adult chinwag with one set of old friends after another. A full week in Berlin, and the five of us have yet to do anything together as a family. Today we aim to remedy this with a morning of sight seeing in the Berlin city centre.

All of us are in high spirits—there are no guests to entertain, no opinions to solicit from friends over what to look at next, no advice from well-meaning mothers-in-law to parry. It's just us.
Therese takes us to lunch at Mövenpick, which I'd always thought was just another American ice cream brand marketed with a contrived European name. But no! Mövenpick is a full-service restaurant complete with sauces, table cloths and wine lists.

Sadly Therese must leave us after lunch for her conference talk, but the fun has just begun. Mövenpick has a fantastic play area for kids, where Bettina discovers a bin full of My Little Ponies with the requiste combs. She is in little-girl heaven.

In the same bin, Vanessa finds a toy gorilla. (What else would you expect in a box full of ponies?) She holds the gorilla to my face and says in her deepest gorilla voice, "Clean your room!" in allusion to her favourite Calvin and Hobbes comic, for one of the best laughs of the day.

But the best entertainment lies outside, in front of the aquarium, and for once it's not a playground—at least not in the usual sense.

There's a heap of flag stones assembled haphazardly into a fountain. The kids beg me to let them climb on it. Seeing no VERBOTEN signs, I give them a hesitant "o…kay", expecting at any moment to be barked at by some grumpy city authority figure. But not only are we not run off, other kids draw inspiration from the sight of us up there and join in! In five minutes, a whole school yard of kids is climbing and drawing on the rocks with chalk-like stones. It's now 5pm, and I have to drag them back to Oma's house.

The kids, fueled by two hours of intense, physical imaginative play, literally sprint the three blocks to the subway station, leap frogging one another and prodding one another on to ever faster speeds.

On the first leg of the subway home, I show Cornelia how to get around a big city with a subway map, and once in the station, how to find your platform. We're hungry and beat---a perfect segue to one last lesson! I invite Cornelia and Vanessa to go buy us some salami buns from a snack stand on the subway platform. They're scared, but they work up the nerve to approach the cashier and order. "Zweimal Semmelbrötchen mit Salami, bitte." Hot dog, she did it! I'm so proud of them, and so are they. The tasty buns, the successful navigation through the scary Berlin subway system, and a surprise, chance meeting with Therese on the last platform ("Hermione! Where'd you come from?!") make a perfect ending to a perfect day.