Good Morning, Berlin - 懷抱有時

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Good Morning, Berlin

2011/07/03 16:10:17瀏覽377｜回應1｜推薦10

     The weather is exceedingly pleasant here in Berlin. We woke up at 4 am thinking that we had slept through the entire night while in fact we only slept for less than 4 hours since we checked in last night.
Scott put on his shirt and jeans to go scouting in the neighborhood. He always does that when we travel. Bridgette and Madison awakened with big smiles on their faces. Bridgette propped herself up and reveled in her reading while Maddy grabbed her little diary and started writing. I boiled some water and cooked the girls some instant noodles that we had packed for this trip. Life is GOOD! There is something about waking up in the wee hours in a foreign country. You feel like God has given you those extra morning hours and set yourself in the mood to appreciate your new surroundings.

     "It's a beautiful day to walk in the city, girls!" one hour later Scott came back all happy and refreshed like he had just had a good workout. "I called Tina(our travel companion) and she sounded sleepy. Not sure if we should wake her up for breakfast?" I told Scott. Tina lost her luggage on our flights from LA to Paris to Berlin. I hope this little incident would not spoil her mood for this trip. There is a certain serenity inTina. She is always at east and peace with everything. Nothing shakes her.

     Coincidentally, we ran into each other in the elevator. Tina and her daughter Audrey were about to come to our hotel room. We walked out a few blocks away and found ourselves a little cafe. The girls' excitement was beyond words. Ordered fruit yogurt, chocolate croissants, hot white chocolate for the girls, and cappuccino for ourselves. How good were those chocolate croissants? As Bridgette
adeptly put it in her diary, “ I savored every morsel!”

Our main itinerary for the day consists of the zigzag- shaped
Judisches Museum,
the Eastside Gallery and the Holocaust Mahnmal. I read that before WWII, there
was a great Jewish population living in the city of Berlin.
The Jews started migration after suffering from the Nazi persecutions.
Therefore, the Jewish culture played a vital role in the German history. And
that’s why you see lots of Jewish museums or memorials scattered around the
city.It is a piece of the German history.

Holocaust-Mahnmal

Judisches Museum

Scott said the idea behind the zigzag shape of the Judische
Museum is that the architect Daniel
Liebenskin first located the different pockets of the
original Jewish settlements scattered in Berlin.
He then drew lines and intersected each one of them. There he birthed the idea of this zigzag form for this museum.

Walking in the museum, one gets a sense of being lost and
compressed. We were pressed for time(mainly because the kids had been exhausted
from walking) and only barely finished one floor of the entire three-floored
museum. I wish I could spend the whole day here.

There is so much history in there that you wish you could spend the
whole day immersing yourself in the rich culture of the Jews. A multitude of
documents tell story after story of the Jewish people. I came across reading this Jewish lady named Gilkl(I’m botching it) who
gave birth to 14 children and was a great helper of her husband. She was a
smart merchant, a model citizen of the Jewish community and most importantly she was a
strong believer in that all the good things came from God. Another living
testimony, besides my always gracious mother-in-law, of the woman portrayed Proverbs
31.

Brandenburger Tor, major Berlin landmark, built in 1791.

Berlin train stations

It feels kinda of surreal walking in East Berlin. It is the biggest metropolitan city between Moscow and Paris but it lacks of the big city crowd. Or the history of the city just weighs you down. It started to rain in the evening as the forecast predicted, but it felt just right.

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