BRRRRRRRRRLIN!

“Family Dinner” takes on “Family Vacation”! … but not before the weekly food gathering of course. Instead of dinner this past week we decided to go big and do a full on dessert night – everyone welcome! And considering only one apartment has an oven the desserts were quite impressive and Pinteresters everywhere would be in awe of our success. Tuesday Erica, Kat and I prepped for dessert night as I made my Nutella cookies with my “advanced easy bake oven” (it only has an on/off switch) and we got in the Christmas mood blasting our holiday tunes and watching Elf. We’re in Europe so all my Americans back home you STILL have to wait till after Thanksgiving to start Christmas festivities because you get turkey this Thursday and we don’t. So what did dessert night entail? Snickers salad dip, apple crisp crumble, worms n’ dirt, truffles, cake, chocolate banana truffles, cookies, gourmet popcorn, brie, bread, raspberries, dark chocolate almond bark, whipped cream and bottles and bottles of wine. This was a night you did not want to miss out on and we are planning on doing it again considering we only have…uhhh let’s not talk about it…days left.

So Thursday the family headed to Berlin! That is all of us minus Nathan since he had to go sing for the Czech President in honor of the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution…I guess that's more important than family vaca. It was about a 4.5 hour bus ride and they showed The Terminal AGAIN. This is the 3^rd time I’ve been shown this movie on the bus and a movie I never thought I would be able to quote. Luckily the second movie was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (notice Philosopher not Sorcerer in Europe hehe). But when we arrived it was the beginning of a very, very, very cold weekend and once we eventually found our hostel we ate the first of many kebabs.

Ken, Anna, Matt, Me, Sunny, Rachel, Vanessa

Friday we went on a nearly 4 hour walking tour and by the end I did not have feeling in my toes. Our tour guide was an awesome Brit who definitely knew his history. We saw the Holocaust memorial, the Berlin Wall, the window that Michael Jackson horrifically dangled his baby from, Checkpoint Charlie, the ground above Hitler’s suicide, the Nazi book burning memorial, and a suicidal horse statue on top of a building that nobody knows why it’s there. 

As evident by everything I just listed, Germany has a very dark past and as the tour guide mentioned it’s easy to naturally think of all these things when you think of Germany but we have to remember there is so much to appreciate in this part of the world. For example, we got to see Humboldt University where 29 Nobel Peace Prize winners have studied and where the original stories of the Grimm brothers are kept. After the tour we ran to find warmth and eat some good food…neither of those things happened. After finally gaining the feeling back in our bodies we realized the restaurant was just not AS cold as the outside and the soup we had was gross. But things got better once we took a visit to Ritter Sport to stuff our faces with the best chocolate we have ever had!

After stopping back at the hostel to figure out our next plans, preferably sooner rather than later since our hostel was one of the least welcoming environments we’ve been in and if we stayed too long you would start freaking yourself out by the people that were staying there. We decided to go the famous Hofbräuhaus for a liter of beer, a pretzel, and a great German atmosphere complete with a dance floor! We then attempted to venture into a different neighborhood and stumbled upon a cool candle-lit bar and on the walk back ended the night in the strangest disco kebab place for kebab #2 and ran into some rabbits on our walk home.

Saturday we hit up the East Side Gallery, which is the longest permanent open air gallery in the world! We then went to Alexanderplatz to walk around and enjoy some street food.  After getting lost, but luckily had a metro pass for the day so we didn’t have to freeze quite as much, we stumbled upon Potsdamer Platz where Christmas festivities were going on including a giant snow hill for people to tube down – we seriously were watching families and little kids going down this for 30 minutes - it was the perfect combination of hilarity and cuteness. Then on our way back to the hostel we ate kebab #3 for dinner.

Our last day we visited the Topography of Terror Museum since it was free and near our hostel and went back to the chocolate store Ritter Sport to make our own chocolate and enjoy some peppermint hot chocolate aka Christmas in a cup. My last meal being Curryworst we said goodbye to Berlin and could not wait to get back to Prague! It was a great family vacation but once again another trip done and we all could not help but talk about how much we belong in Prague. Most topics of conversation revolved around our love for kepabs, Prague, trying to understand the dislike of traveling but wanting to go everywhere, Prague, and complaining about how cold, tired, and in desperate need of a shower we were – but what’s a family vacation without complaints and whining? 

ONE MONTH LEFT. 
How do we measure...measure a month?

Kebabs. Photo credit to Sunny Wilson.

In fried cheese? In goulash? In dumplings? In mugs of beer? In movie nights? In pub crawls? In family dinners? In metro stops? In Kebabs? In Marcel's smirks at our pub? In the amount of times I say nemluvím český? In "Oh maños? In pitchers of sangria? In Sunny's pictures of trash? 

These are all sad, unfortunate questions to ponder. I think it's safe to say none of us are ready to leave this place. 





*ps I accidentally forget to hit publish on my last blog post until today so go read "keeping it glassy" if you want to read some outdated material to go with Facebook pictures of a week ago.