Aaaargh. Why Kent, why!?
picnic time!
actually, any time the sun shines its lovely rays of pure goodness onto us... well sir, that's picnic time.
Hooray for holidays!
we hooked up with our ex-pat buddies and headed into the templehof park.
it's pretty amazing. really it's just an airport, or was, and now it's a city park.
just acres of grass, tweeting birds and semi-naked old men flying kites.
They love to get their gear off here! (Saw a granny today in her bikini. That was all. I say good on her.)
there's also roller-skaters, cyclists, pairs-yoga and excited teens with crates of lemon flavoured beer.
quite the cultural event.
historical vagueries:
at one point, just after ww2, the soviets blockaded west berlin. basically, the ruskies wanted it, and they didn't want the yanks, the poms and the frogs to have it anymore. so they stopped all supplies going in and were hoping that they'd starve the west berliners into submission. the yanks weren't gonna stand for that sort of shinanigans, so they flew tonnes of supplies into west berlin, every day, for like, 18 months, using tempelhof airport. the commies eventually gave up their ridiculous plan and re-opened the supply lines into the city. west berlin was allowed to continue on its merry western way.
This is actually the full history that I heard while we were waiting for the others. I think I learnt more from Kent in that 20 minutes than I did in six years of secondary education. National Curriculum? Sort yourself out already!
Water? Or Champagne? Champagne!
we sat on our doona cover, drank cheap booze, sampled lucy's genuinely top-notch catering and got a little bit sunburnt.
sunburnt!
i know.
we also learnt that drinking several litres of alcohol, in the sun, in the middle of a field the size of an international airport, could eventually lead to a situation in which you find yourself scurrying like an olympic walker to the perimeter fence in a desperate attempt to avoid your kidneys from exploding with escalating toiletry necessitude.
I did my first bush-pee in about ... 14 years! So proud of myself! Unfortunately, after a bottle of champagne, one's judgment tends to be somewhat flawed, so what I thought was a bush, was really a small shrub, and what I thought was dense foliage was actually a main road, with cars whizzing by and cyclists passing a nice white moon bum pointing at them. Luckily I was laughing so hard that I didn't have the capacity to be embarrassed. The litres of alcohol also helped my confidence.
And after many beers, sandwiches, and other culinary delights, the troops fall into a comatose state.
Which makes for good prodding.
as we come closer to the end of our stay, mixed as it is with both a sadness at leaving and an excitement to be heading to a new future back in the southern hemisphere, we've taken to walking around the areas of berlin that we haven't seen yet.
there isn't really much of it left that we haven't covered, but it's been nice to stumble on some little nooks and crannies about the place, and to flesh out our coverage of the city.
also, the weather has been perfect lately, and all the trees are green, and there's so many blossom trees, it's really transformed berlin into a rather pretty space. Lush.
there's a lot of little parks everywhere and lots of cafes now flooding the footpaths with their seats.
we had a nice lunch in a little park in mitte before wandering off into a new stretch of interesting shops.
they love their bulbs here. flowers are sprouting up everywhere.
more wonderful artwork on buildings. they really do love to slap up pictures on things, bless 'em.
this is the park around the corner from us. so lush now. the transition has been phenomenal really. when i think about what this must be like in reverse in autumn, i'm kinda glad i'm not here for that. all this colour, life and beauty, sucked out and returned to grey. blurgh. but then again, to see it over the course of many years, it must be like this oscillating, breathing, organic machine.
I think we've managed to convince ourselves that it was always spring here, so it doesn't feel like we're going back to winter again. It is a nice feeling. Though that might change when we land in Melbourne ...
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