I was getting so sick and tired of this awful weather we've been having in Berlin. So when the sun started peeking through on Friday I was ecstatic. I had a smile on my face the whole way home from work. That was also partly because work was pretty stressful on Friday, but oh well. Sunny weekend ahead!
Boyfriend is going to Israel for two weeks while he's on leave, and since his flight was out of Berlin he came up for the weekend. He got in Friday night, and we went for some drinks at the cafe outside my flat, where we met some friendly Germans, their beautiful dog, and tried Wobble Bubble-this kind of weird pudding that is the cafe's specialty.
Saturday we decided we'd go to Tempelhof since it was such great weather. Tempelhof is this old airport (i think the Nazis built it actually) but they closed it in 2008 and now it's a big park. It was actually very important during the Cold War since it was used a lot during the Berlin Airlift. Lots of history!
You don't realize how big an airport is until you're walking on the runway and having a picnic in between the lanes. It's huge! We walked around it before getting to the actual park, which gave you an idea of how huge this airport was.
Once we got to the park we found some shade and rested, watching people playing frisbee or riding bikes. Then we discovered the Bier Garten, and Hefeweizens were in order. We walked around a bit after that, but since it was getting hot and we're both pretty fair we decided we'd better head back and try to find a late lunch. We found some Thai and had some awesome Thai iced tea with lime (and ice cubes!!) and then we looked through a street market near Hackescher Markt and bought some raspberries for a euro (yay breakfast!). As we turned the corner we ran into this weird dirty hippie parade-that's the only way to describe it. A bunch of vans and cars, rigged up with awful pounding techno music, were slowly crawling along the street, surrounded by tons of unwashed hippy-hipster types dancing really crazy and holding signs about art being for all. And bringing up the rear were the Polizei. We watched for a while and then got bored and moved on to find some shade by the river.
After that we headed back to Charlottenburg. There are a ton of great restaurants near my flat, and one that's always intrigued me is this Georgian one (Georgia the country!). Boyfriend lived in Russia, and when he saw it he was like oh, their food is great! So we decided we'd go there for dinner. We ate kinda late, but the food was AMAZING. Oh my gosh. We tried a menu for 2 people and we had so much food we were near to bursting. The first dish was a salad with parsley and radishes, as well as these spinach balls with pomengranate seeds, soft bread, and this tasty, mild goat cheese. Then we had some beef soup, followed by meat and vegetable dumplings, then cheese bread, then beans, and finally lamb and pork kebabs. It was so amazing. At the end the waitress offered us a complimentary drink-schnapps or tea or coffee. It was nearly midnight at this point, so we took the tea/coffee offer, and Boyfriend even spoke Russian with the Russians who'd come outside from inside the resto to smoke. That was pretty cool. I'll have to go back there some time!
Sunday just about everything is closed we decided we'd make the most of the weather again and spend the day outside. We walked around an antique market (found a lot of cool stuff but a lot of the vendors were super unfriendly!) and then stopped for some sandwiches at Einstein Cafe (a Berlin favorite) and finally found the Victory Column. For 2€ you can climb to the top, so we did. It was a great view.
Once we climbed back down we explored the memorial to Bismarck, sat in the park for a bit, and then headed to Kreuzberg to meet Cisco and some other people from my program to watch the USA vs Brazil game (USA won by the way!) A bunch of people were there and some interns from the US Embassy passed out red white and blue leis and flags. We watched for a bit and hung out with my fellow Halle-people, but then Boyfriend and I left at halftime to find some Indian food. The neighborhood was totally hipster, but those hipsters do know a thing or two about cheap, tasty food. After some good dinner we walked around a bit, but we can only take so much dirty hipster and we headed back to Charlottenburg before too long...
Boyfriend left at 4 am this morning to catch his plane (crazy!) but I just had work. We had to move all the art we're selling over to the venue. That was kinda crazy-plus I had to speak German with the movers as well as with the artists who showed up asking me a million questions I didn't know the answer to. But this was the end result; all moved in!
From there I had to go back to the office and try to get the artist info sheets done. I feel like my German is really improving from writing all this stuff up!
Rundgang starts Thursday! Hopefully it all goes off without a hitch!
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