Mark and Liz's Excellent Adventures: Friday, May 23, 2014

We began what would turn out to be a whirlwind day by heading to Charlottenburg Palace. Today was mom's birthday and we wanted to let her direct us, so we went here first. The palace is only about a kilometer from our hotel. We only walked around the gardens, which are still beautiful. We noted that even though we've been to the grounds many times, none of us present have ever been inside.

Claire made a friend!

Next stop was the Ku'damm again, and we went to Kathe Wohlfahrt to get some Christmas goods. Their selection is better by far than the Christmas store in Leavenworth, but still expensive. We came out with ornaments and a mini cuckoo clock for Narumi.

Claire loved this, so obviously we need a spinning Christmas tree this year.

I dropped by the Hertha BSC store and deliberated over whether I should buy a jersey, but ultimately decided against it. I can get the jerseys on the website for the same price.

We wandered into KaDeWe but didn't stay long. We found a grassy area near Wittenbergplatz station and ate our lunches here. Claire amused us by chasing down a group of pigeons.

Lunch eaten, we headed over to Tiergarten for a walk - Tiergarten is Berlin's equivalent to Central Park. But there was a problem: we discovered that Claire's binky was missing. She was very unhappy by the time we got to the Reichstag. We left her with Grandma and Grandpa and tried to find a place to buy one - we ended up having to go all the way to the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, where we got replacements at Rossman's. Crisis averted!

Creepy tree in Tiergarten

We were now on the hunt for ice cream. The few places we spotted in Mitte did not meet our expectations, so we took a bus and found a place in Alexanderplatz. Not bad, but the place in Mexicoplatz was better. We also saw the guy selling wursts from his portable, wearable grill - Liz and Dad couldn't resist.

Liz gets a wurst from the Grill Runner.

We decided to give a shot at visiting the Dahlem museum. This meant transferring to our old U-Bahn line, the U3 (known as the U2 when we lived here). After amusing ourselves at the naked people chairs at Dahlem-Dorf, we found the museum - but it was too close to closing time for our tastes. We walked to our church building nearby and took a break availing ourselves of the building's wifi. We took a bus to Oskar-Helene-Heim, but it really wasn't a good place to find food. So, we took the U-Bahn back to Wittenbergplatz. We found a restaurant that suited our tastes. The only problem was that our outdoor seating was not extremely well covered, meaning that Mom and Liz got a little wet before we scooched our table. The other only problem was our service wasn't very good. Our final only problem was that Claire pooped and since it was raining we had to search for a good place to change her. I proposed that we designate yesterday as Mom's real birthday dinner. The motion was adopted unanimously.

Liz forced me to pose for this. I was young and stupid and needed the money!

Claire wearing Grandma's hat on the U-Bahn.

We know if we left now we could make it to the RitterSport store before closing time, so we decided to give it a shot. We made it with about 45 minutes to spare before they closed. I was immediately filled with joy upon entering the store and knew we had made the right decision. Not only can you get every variety of RitterSport that is available, you can even make your own bar, specifying what you want included. If we had arrived at an earlier time, we probably would have done this. As it was, we bought a big bag of assorted RitterSport bars for 13.50 euros, which was a great value. You can get RitterSport in the USA, but not at these prices or with this variety. We were all glad we made the effort to come out here. The RitterSport store delighted us all. We returned to our hotel on our final U-Bahn ride of this trip. All in all, we had a great visit to Berlin. I would like to have visited a few more museums, but otherwise I'm satisfied with our trip here.