tara and shawn arrive (143/365b)

So fun to see Tara and Shawn again today!

All morning Theodore and Henry couldn't figure out what to be excited about. They were packing to go off to a day of camp with the asp, and Henry still needed a new sleeping bag. Brian took felix to get his cast renewed, and Nina came over briefly. Then he went for a run, and got a willhaben sleeping bag, and picked up Tara and Shawn from the train station. They passed each other on the platform somehow, but then found each other again.

Theodore and Henry wanted to show everything, do everything, eat and make and talk and explain, but they also really wanted to leave. They packed everything up, i took them there in the lastenrad, 

all packed:
violin, djembe, cello, umbrella, sleeping bags, smiles

and then headed away to the sound of theodore explaining to henry that he doesn't ever feel homesick.

picking all the apples before they leave(after fixing the apple picker with twist ties)

Nina visits our invalid

showing tante tara his treasure box

There were unbelievable thunderstorms all night. i alternated between feeling like "eh, i trust fritz, they're totally fine" and "i hope they're ok, and dry, and not scared, and that they didn't leave their instruments out."

private gallery viewing (142/365b)

We didn't go anywhere yesterday, but I had thought yesterday or today i would check when this mechanical art gallery would be open and take the kids to it. not wanting to risk the trip without knowing when they were open, and not finding things online so easily, i rode there first, and saw the gallery set up, but the sign on the door said the final day was yesterday. i was crestfallen. then i asked in the gallery next door, whether i could just look inside. she tried to call the artist and then the curator and got no answer. took my phone number and went inside again.

later i got a text message: they are opening for you and your family at 2pm. i texted back, thank you thank you!

it was a gallery of plywood machine sculptures by niki passath .... very wonderful. we were only sad the mechanical drawing arm was not turned on to paint a canvas. the other sculptures all turned on moved in synchronicity. it was fun to try not to get hit by a revolving arm while walking around and seeing what the similarities and differences were.

deep analysis

all the boys

henry wondering if he can make one himself

plywood gears

it was super cool, but the artist has much cooler things that he's done. i was very impressed by the book in the gallery of some of his other work.

stay home day (141/365b)

carried felix around to everything today. didn't do anything else. really.

theodore picked dozens of apples and started making a new pastry invention sometime after 9pm.

henry read stories to felix, and my heart melted.

i saw the united intonations entertainer video for the first time and i could not stop laughing. we must have watched it 6 times in a row. it came out so well. :)

theodore's diagram and name etymology for apple box pie

in the foreground the diagram for apple box pie
late at night theodore knocks on our door.
"i'm going to bed, mama and papa. can you please take my pie out of the oven in 45 minutes?"

Henry prefers to sleep on the floor tonight.
we move him to his bed after he falls asleep, and he gets up and moves back to his spot on the floor.

hospital cake (140/365b)

The day started yummily (of course!) with very perfect coffee.

not so demur

super cute, huh?

some last photo impressions of berlin... we walked around. not quite enough time before the flight to go any where for real, but too long to go straight there.

goodbye purple bra (said maybe the guy in the 4th floor)

bike shop with street sign wheel

good bye airbnb with the weird unicorn mask thing

At the airport I wrote to Brian: 

at the airport

Berlin Tegel

no toilet paper

no wifi

no passport control (at all)

no joke

Kurt and Kris picked us up from the airport, and i was home in no seconds flat. I found a note to tell me everyone was at the playground, so I biked there. Scooting my kids home (it's unfair for mama to have a bike) felix's foot got caught in the back wheel between the frame and the spokes. He screamed and screamed "never never" will he go to the hospital. I asked him if i could pack him a special snack, he stopped crying and sputtered "popcorn." so i made popcorn. worried about finding the right place. after 3 phone calls i still wasn't sure the correct location for non-life-threatening accidental injuries to kids where bones may or also may not be involved. the phone calls were for nothing. the taxi driver knew exactly where we needed to go (better than the lady at the call center even!)

before

after

Spent the evening in the hospital. (lightly fractured, quick recovery, cast/no walking for at least a week) Got home to find Centa and the boys had baked him a hospital cake. Not exactly a welcome home from berlin evening with pictures and stories. But overall, much better than it could have been.

poor felix (11:30pm before the sugar high)

plan b (139/365b)

My uterus rebelled against a day trip, so I slept all morning. No sans soucci, although I am technically "without worry". Nina went out alone and I listened to someone reading "the art of loving" ... when i got up at noon our flatmates were still there in the kitchen watching some kind of show.

Nina and I went for a walk to find yummy coffee, and then wandered to various little fruit vendors and a little organic grocery store and found ourselves all the fixings for a delicious salad lunch. oh my was everything delicious. we didn't even get to the figs, they'll have to wait till tomorrow.

i wanted to go get macarons at the best place ever, and we thought it would be nice to explore kreuzberg. it probably would be a better place to explore before all the shops close. but it was nice to walk around. our macarons place was closed but a place around the corner sells them, and we went there. it was a kind of grey cold day anyways, and we liked sitting inside and watching people. they had 6 macarons left. so we split them.

not exactly graffiti

one left

found a really nice planter garden

stopped for dinner at an asian place with really nice lighting. we might have gone to a cute looking srilanken place, but an old man seeing us walk by yelled at us because he thought we were nice. hey! you!

sushi and mock duck

trippy lighting

hooray i made it through the day! tomorrow is sadly already our last day in berlin.

markets in parks and concerts in parks (138/365b)

how could we spend 5 hours shopping and not really buy anything?
the answer is partially in these 1000words:

this was the size of the crowd through the entire mauerpark, so you can't go very fast

my eyemakeup from yesterday hadn't completely rubbed off, and whenever i caught a glimpse of myself i was a little astonished at my emo-ness. Shopping always is a little stressful, but there was so much interesting stuff to look at I was distracted. I practiced my "street photography"...

with limited success

and also experienced a complete street photography fail, where I put my camera up to take a picture, and the lady jumped up and yelled at me for not buying any of her stuff, and if i bought something i could take her picture. After that we needed a break.

taking a break for some peace, too bad the button is just drawn on.

At Mauerpark again, looking through the various old stuff. just big huge cardboard boxes of random stuff, lots broken, and worthless. then you pick up some little object and hold it up and one of the guys in charge shouts down what seems to be a random price, with the idea that you haggle somehow. We didn't really want anything and aren't hagglers. Plus we were getting tired of walking around.

We headed to the outskirts of the zoological garden, where there was a little park. We sat on the wall and wrote some postcards and listened from far away to the band playing. At intermission we were ready to go home, but we thought we'd listen to one more song from the front row. We ended up staying right up through the end. Despite creepy dude who told me i should put on sexier clothes because he liked to look. Despite super drunk man who yelled at the audience. Laughing a little at the lady who came up with little tiny bottles of schnapps and gave it to the singer, because it was her birthday. We all sang happy birthday to unknown lady and then a really awkward nerdy guy in his 20s came and stood by the stage for a song or two, and then leaned over to tell her "it's my birthday too." so she said happy birthday to EVERYBODY and gave him a tiny bottle of schnapps. That was hilarious. We danced and cheered and got into a more party attitute (i may be slightly addicted to the music high i get) Plus we knew we were going to go back in the evening, put our feet up and have some hummus.

marie chain in concert
can you sign the cd: "nina und irma?"
"nina und ihr mann?"

Oh the hummus. We would go get hummus on our way back. But staying to buy the cd and have it signed, and walking back through the park with no lights, and waiting for the u bahn, and times not working out, we got out of the train slightly after 10 when they closed, walked really fast and found lights still on at quarter past. Before they told us the place was closed we explained we really just wanted a bowl of hummus, nothing else. "we're are all out of hummus. we open again at tuesday at 5." but we'll be gone by then! we were crestfallen. we explained how we had rushed her, how we had looked forward to it, how much we loved it. they asked if we had hummus in graz, and we said yes, but not THIS hummus. We said we make it ourselves but it's not so good. and then one of the workers there said she actually had gotten herself a bowl of hummus takeaway for her own dinner, and "we could have it"....... just have it. don't worry about it. and please enjoy it. and have a good night. and bye.

i squeaked with happiness, and we walked back and enjoyed the yummy food, and chatted with our airbnb roommates, who are very odd. their version of berlin site-seeing seems to be sitting in the apartment and looking at tourmaps, watching tv shows, and doing laundry in the most complicated way possible. we told them we wanted to see sans soucci tomorrow, and they told us it was a very sad place and we didn't want to go. i eventually figured out they didn't mean sans soucci but Sachsenhausen, which is a little different.

costume saturday (137/365b)

this day was so incredibly full it'll be hard to write everything down. it was a beautiful day, all told, although it was a little cool outside, and we wore jackets when we were moving. as soon as we got in the u-bahn though, man was it hot. we could have sworn they were heating it. then we were freezing when we got back out.

we took public transportation a lot more today, especially since we had planned to be all over the city for specific times/events

first stop though, ALWAYS, will be coffee. the instant coffee at the airbnb just won't cut it for me (wahwah, my picky side comes out)

that's what i'm talking about!
(at Zuckerstück)

and then back towards the brandenburg tor to go see an exhibition of Dalí. Well,  we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, and there were no explanations near the artwork. I asked for a booklet, but they were sold out. The lady at the desk would have gladly sold me *last* year's booklet. For the same exhibition? No, a different one. Umm, no I don't want one from last year, thank you. We had all our stuff locked in a locker, and I was very thirsty and the air in the museum was very dry. And there was, as I said no explanation about any of the art. But the art was still fascinating, and the prints for books for which I knew the stories were the best.

I looked out the window and saw there was a big festival going on outside, so when we were done we went in search of it.
We found their advertisement first. A group of fantastic drummers beating on various things with gigantic smiles. Then we tried to get into the festival. But there was security, and lines, and it was really for people interested in local government.

Groove Onkels in action

We wanted to get to the medieval festival (nikolaifestspiele) and we made it, and looked around just as a gigantic wind blew through with a cloudburst, all the coffeeshops took down their umbrellas, the streets became deserted, everyone was huddling in the doorways.

some strangers: holding an umbrella and an aperol spritzer, looking at the empty streets.

we got to the very weird restaurant, the wilde matilde, where we sat for 30minutes without anyone asking us if we wanted anything. tira and patrick found us, and we waited for the advertised variete show, but it was rather a disappointment.

christina aguilara

so we ran away, and found pizza and listened to stimmgewalt, a heavy metal a capella band.

the rain had stopped, so there were lots of people walking around again. lots of fun steampunk stuff to admire in little stands.

we opted for something sweet around the corner. Poor Patrick got something that we all deemed inedible. Oh well. We were all on our way out now, us to our Baroque concert, them to Blutengel.

Nina and I walked all around the Nikolaiplatz first though, and found an Otto Lillienthal glider (modeled on plans by Davinci, as Theodore tells me when I get home a few days later)

the wind was blowing incredibly!

off to schloss charlottenburg, where we quickly changed into something more appropriate for a pretty event after dodging a comment or two of "who let the tourists walk into here before the concert?

nina's artistic eye

we had a-class tickets, but it was no matter, the place wasn't nearly half full, which was a shame, it was really a gloriously beautiful concert, both to listen to and especially to look at.

more of nina's artistic eye

we had enough time afterwards to get back to our airbnb and change into something completely different.

aaaah! be very afraid!
dali-inspired dandelion turns sperm turns melting clock with man hands and backwards roman numerals
WHAT does it mean??

it took us a little while to find the dance venue. Nina had perfectly written directions, except we got disoriented coming out of the u-bahn station. who wouldn't with a 15degree temperature drop? we followed a few goths and they led us right to where we wanted to go, and were very glad we had found ear plugs early in the day.. i wasn't even the only birkenstock wearing goth. patrick didn't even recognize us! haha, we danced till 3am, and then went home giggly and exhausted.

first full day in Berlin - SO MUCH walking (136/365b)

hot water was off in the morning, and nina fixed it all by herself.

nina convinced me to take a photo of these guys, while i made an utter fool of myself trying to pretend like i was taking a picture of something else. of course they were so drunk at 9am that they wouldn't have noticed me taking their picture even if i had asked them point blank.

let's have a party in the middle of the street

speaking of 9am... when we went to get coffee we couldn't find anything in the area open before 9am. and when we got to the closest one that opened at 9, the owner of the shop hadn't put the tables outside yet, and she asked us to give her a minute, because she wasn't quite ready to make a coffee yet.

walking is really by far the best way to explore any city. so walk we did. hours and hours and hours, no ubahn for even a stop. i was walking barefoot, with fancy shoes just in case we wanted to go inside somewhere fancy. but lucky me finally became the owner of a pair of birkenstocks, and then a proud owner of some extremely angry blisters. who breaks in a pair of shoes by walking a new city? #onlyirma

found while walking:

holocaust memorial, a study of greys

construction site, a kind of before and after

we walked around a lot of sites and did a lot! alexanderplatz to checkpoint charlie and back, by way of the brandenburg tor and a lot of people watching.
we found a vegan food festival, full of fried food carts, and they even had a vegan sausage workshop, which was so funny to watch.
the festival was in the shadow of the tourist symbol the tv tower, and also of a mega hotel advertising a 40thfloor view of the city with a rooftop lounge. so we chose the latter with the hope of a pre-dinner glass of something. by the top we were partched and dehydrated by a mixture of sun/wind/walking around all day and the price of a soft drink was higher than some good bottles of wine and served without love.

irma photographing the sites from above

so .... i asked where i could refill my water bottle... on the 2nd floor, 5 floors down the stairs, 34 floors down the elevator, no problem, through the doors marked WC to a very nice hotel bathroom, which when i got out of back to the double doors, they were locked. a guy from wisconsin also came out of the bathroom and started banging on the door with me. what were we going to do now? he knew a different elevator on the side we were on, and he wanted to go back to the bar, so he went down a floor, i went up 35 floors, got out, went into the stairwell, up 5 floors, LOCKED. I banged on the door there and a hotel worker poked his head out, sorry, you have to come up the other side. OK, i said, how do i get there? you have to walk down to the main desk. 40 floors down in a locked stairwell. OK fine, so i did, went up the correct elevator, up the next 5 floors, and phew, finally got some water. is this an #onlyirma story? i think so. 

and we found dinner and ice cream with tira and patrick, who were nice enough to suggest a place. typical berlin style you walk these very unwelcoming looking streets, turn a nondescript corner and find a block booming and bustling with restaurants and people.

choosing ice cream
don't know what's up with the red cast
but i liked it
so i didn't edit it away

since it was only an hour and 40 minute walk back to our airbnb we walked it. when a security guard didn't let us cut off a half a km by walking through his parking lot a mile from home we started feeling a bit annoyed with the decision. and when we got back we were first kind to our poor feet and then we were asleep instantly.

off to berlin (135/365b)

how am i allowed to pack without going a little crazy first and trying to go quick last minute necessities shopping only to get home to find i bought a package of the wrong size of underwear. #onlyirma

What trip with a girlfriend would be complete without champagne at the airport?

answer of course: none!

the truth is, that even though it was a very short flight itself, the trip itself is completely long. we really were travelling from 3 till nearly 9 if you include to and from airports and waiting etc. but nina is a great travel buddy. we understand each others' needs for snacks and are on the same sweet then salty then sweet then salty wavelength.

arrival in Berlin. graffiti of course on every possible surface.

also, when we found our airbnb and had checked in, we went to get food at the closest place only to find they were all vegetarian (mostly vegan even) didn't speak german, had an apple tree in their manmade beach oasis and had the most delicious hummus ever, but NOT enough of it. We walked home happy and contented and sleepy with plenty of anticipation for the next few days.

robert stolz concert (134/365b)

Robert Stolz is one of those composers who couldn't find a home when he was alive and everyone wants to claim now that he's long dead...
He's from Graz because he was born here.
from Vienna because he lived there
from Berlin because he studies and later died there
from America because he fled there and wrote music from hollywood

but who cares where he's from, all my quintet cares about is that his music is fun to play and Graz sometimes names things after where he's from, like streets. The new senior center opened a new wing, and his name was slapped on it and we got invited to play for the opening, and his grandnephew was there to say a few words.

after the concert

Since there were lots of political speeches etc. i told brian to bring the kids only later. they played on the grass for the boring stuff.

i did lots of snuggling in the afternoon in anticipation of leaving on my trip tomorrow, but then it got too much hometime so we went to the abenteuerspielplatz, and i went for a nice long walk with manuela, and got home in time to read felix a bedtime story.

podcast (133/365b)

Sent the kids to the sommeratelier again, this time we picked up theodore's friend luki also ... they had gotten back from vacation at 1am, and were not quite awake when we were picking him up. but luki seemed happy, and felix and i got a little bit of alone time. i got to practice a little too.

nina came over (finally back from her trip!) and even offered to put together lunch while i went back into town to grab the big kids. that was super nice and super yummy and super. we looked up stuff for our berlin trip on thursday, and then went our separate ways.

i was off to quintet rehearsal, and then afterwards we had a podcast scheduled. i packed everything for the possibility of staying over night because it was supposed to be at 1:30am our time, but naaah, we called him at 21:30 and that worked much better. i wasn't in charge of the setting up of this, but the guy is from bolivia and has a podcast in english about culture and how it makes the world a better place.

it took us a few tries to get everything to work

and then hoorah! marcello jordan! 

in mureck (132/365b)

we were thrilled to be allowed to go see where ingrid's lake hut was. first we had to take a train to near the slovenian border, and then ingrid and her dog mäx walked us the mile to the lake. it was very hot, but thankfully we got there in time to cool off.

the shore is never shallow, it is deep, over my head basically the second you get in. henry and i had bought arm swim floater things for security, and there were always people in the water with them anyways. i was being pretty lazy, and i'm not a very confident swimmer so i wore a swim vest the whole time, flashing back to times when i was a kid on a rowboat.

the neighbors lent me a paddle boat (while i was sleeping on a lawn swing, so i was surprised to see our people on the lake when i awoke) ... dinner was grilled veggies, and ingrid and karli had halloumi for the first time. it was all very yummy. i got to paddle around the lake too, and do more swimming.

our time was very relaxing. we stayed as late as we could then we walked quickly to catch the very last train home not even stopping to pick some perfect ripe plums hanging directly over the street. we sang canons on our way.

Brian paddleboarding

felix wearing brian's pants for the ride home, how cute

a plane at sunset over the power lines

But one more thing. when we got back, we left the kids for a few minutes, nominally to get themselves ready for bed, while we went to pick up our csa box that we're taking care of for jackie and andi. also a guy called to say we could pick up 90 kids books from willhaben. so brian and i went together to do that and we came back to find the kids not ready for bed at all, and complaining that we should watch a movie. naaaah, not tonight.

to schlossberg to find figs (133/365b)

felix insisted on taking a trip up schlossberg to find figs. and there were no figs today, only a tree laden with little tiny unripe ones. i have no problem with the insistence on the hike, but i cannot ripen figs on command. it made felix a little bit sour so he was cranky until we got back down, and they played statues in the street.

we should have put out a busking box for collection

a very wide angle selfie

while we were up there i found some typical graffiti... made me think of ...

"all in all you're just a-

-nother brick 

in the wall

into the abyss for the lift

and my favorite part of summer! finding weddings everywhere!

i love the photographer's colorful shoes!
and the holding-hands graffiti
and the intimate pose after being shouted to "more intimate!"