Über Spielplatz „Sherwood Forest“

Last weekend Tangential was sick and Maddyn needed a nap, so Jill and I decided to have a girls only outing towards our goal of visiting the Top10 Spielplätze. The day's adventure: the Sherwood Forest Über Spielplatz. Within very short walking distance of Savignyplatz s-bahn station--one of my favourite stations, with gorgeous decorations that I need to post about--it's in a bit more of an urban area than most, and with that comes the unfortunate Berlin graffiti. Apparently graffiti is very much debated here: a lot of people agree that graffiti is unsightly and should have harsher punishments, but others believe that it's a valid form of artistic expression and should be protected. I've personally seen some gorgeous graffiti here, including a Doctor Who theme on a wall and some very impressive pieces on trains, but a lot of it also seems to be tagging and English-language swear words in children's playgrounds. I'm getting more and more used to it, but there's so much more graffiti here than I recall seeing in Australia and it's still a very strange idea to me that it would be protected.


In front of the castle is a very cool climbing frame, a water feature, a play house for toddlers, and swings. I didn't quite see immediately why it was an Über Spielplatz until we went behind the castle. The whole area behind the castle just made the outing for Jill. The lovely metal slide, the ramparts, bridges, a climbing wall, and a lovely place under the castle where a fair number of the kids gathered to have a pretend tea party. The park has an unfortunate building site next to it, but it's still very green: lots of bushes, at the very least, to make it fantastical in the middle of the urban setting, and strategically placed rocks for the adults to sit on. I don't know about the other adults, but I had a lovely sit down with my book.


The climbing wall. Jill liked this one a bit more than Rapunzel's hair at the Märchen-Spielplatz, because it wasn't quite as high and scary, but I think they're both fabulous.


I'm collecting a lovely number of photos of the carved statues in the parks here.


I don't know if you can see it clearly, but what looks like an F there is actually a T. This is part of the climbing structure at the front of the park.

All in all, I'd definitely go there again. There's also a very cool flying fox (adventure swing) that connects the castle with the climbing frame at the front of the park, and I think the kids could easily spend hours there.

Berlin Aquarium

One of the kids' favourite places in Berlin is the Berlin zoo and aquarium. They're very reasonably priced, and are such a guarantee of hours of fun that we're saving our pennies to buy an annual family ticket to the zoo. Even still, that's only 180€ (which is quite a bargain considering an annual family ticket to a certain zoo in Australia currently costs between $425 and $920!). Or the utterly ridiculous Sea Life and AquaDom here in Berlin, about which I left a scathing review. Over forty euros admission without taking my husband with me, they charged for Maddyn (nowhere else seems to charge entry for three year-olds, and the zoo will let him in for free until he's five!) and not even a discount despite having less than half the sea creatures the aquarium does, nor that their current building project means some of their exhibits are closed. There are no words for how displeased I was with the entire experience, but I digress. Back to the excellence of the cheaper and far more enjoyable alternative.

Tangential has been working very hard recently and in exchange for a hectic week that saw him coming home at 9.30 one night and midnight another--and even working on Saturday--he scored a day in lieu. Maddyn's been missing his dad dreadfully, so the boys and I headed out to the aquarium.

Maddyn's favourite part of the aquarium is the snakes. On our first visit he sat down next to the giant snake at the top of the main staircase and just watched the one enclosure for twenty minutes. He also loves the giant enclosure of caymans and slider turtles--you can choose to either watch them from a bridge that spans the enclosure or from another floor up, on the floor with the insects and arachnids. He's also a very big fan of the shark tank and the large reef tank that sits in the middle of a lovely chamber of sorts with seats if you fancy a sit down after walking through three floors of aquarium.

There's a back door that takes you from the aquarium into the zoo. We've probably spent ten hours in the zoo so far and we haven't seen a fraction of it. We didn't go this week, but the kids love it there (hence our plan to buy annual tickets). There's even a three-part playground, which was legendary even in winter when we found it deserted and dusted with snow. Alas with our move and our recent exploring most of our photos were taken back when we were in Mitte with sketchy wireless so I don't have the photos handy, but I can't rave enough about how much fun we've had at the zoo.

Playgrounds

We have a goal, these summer holidays, to explore the playgrounds (spielplatzes) of Berlin. We went on a mini tour last holidays, but we have about six times as much time to explore this time and we intend to make the most of it! My mini challenge within this is to explore the Top Ten Berlin Spielplatzes, having recently discovered that there was such a thing.

Jill was absolutely thrilled when she found 'the elephant park' in the list, the listed picture online being the larger elephant multi-level part of the park. We trundled out of the house with our bikes and a picnic lunch and went to see the Zirkus Aladin spielplatz.


It turns out she named the park well. There are two elephants at the park: this is the smaller of the two.


The second elephant has about three levels, accessible by ladders, with a huge metal slide as a trunk. It's brilliant.


It also has a wee circus wagon. Isn't that delightful?

The circus park of course includes dozens of the carvings that are found in so many of the lovely Berlin spielplatzes, as well as rope ladders, climbing ropes, two spinning toys, and the obligatory ping pong table. I have no idea if the carvings are a German thing or just a Berlin thing, but I do have to wonder how they come about. Is there one guy out there who supplies fabulous, carved animals for parks? Is it an industry? I can't say I ever wondered about where playgrounds in Australia came from--they were just there and generally resembled each other, with differences mostly in layout and size, etc. The parks here are such a wonderful enigma, with their metal slides and wooden structures, with the carvings, statues, and ping pong tables instead of swings. I love them, but I also digress. The seating was more than adequate, with a lovely little round seating area decorated with carved animals. Then there was the water toy!


The kids spent a solid hour pumping water and constructing a 'river' until I made them get out of the sun. It was 29 degrees Celsius today, so I didn't fancy them in full sun even with 50+ sunscreen, but rather than having to go home the multi-level structures provided more than enough shade for them to play without getting burned.

Karneval der Kulturen

The second carnival we visited was much, much larger. The annual Karneval der Kulturen ran weekend before last for three days and nights. Our neighbours went earlier in the day, but Maddyn was napping and we agreed to meet up at the Latin music stage.

As per the above link, last year's Karneval attracted 1.45 million people, and you can quite believe it given the sheer mass of people there. The struggle to get out of the train station just to get to the Karneval should have clued me in, but when we went looking for our neighbours we were almost immediately trapped in a slow moving crowd. The stalls on either side of the walkways were doing a very brisk trade as people ducked into them just to get away from the crowd, and the noise was pretty amazing. All manner of voices, languages, and accents. Tangential and I cracked up when a voice called out in a very distinctive Australian accent, 'Hey, do you wanna crepe? I wanna crepe.' Bless.

It seems silly to be surprised by a cultural difference in a carnival like this, but one of the first things we were struck by was the number of people who liked Maddyn's monkey backpack. We've never used it frequently, but it has D rings on the bottom, clips across the chest, and comes with a lead. He thinks it's fabulous, but I've never come across too much support for the idea of leashing children and so was very surprised when we had a number of people come up and ask--one even in English--where we bought it! The one who spoke English mentioned he has a two year-old, and would love something like that so she couldn't run away. I hear him. We took it off so the kids could go on the bouncy slide and before I could put it back on Maddyn spotted a gap in the crowd and sprinted away. The kid's been training for nearly six months on his balance bike and he can run. I pretty much dared for anybody to judge me after managing to catch my son after a five minute run and him deciding to weave in and out of the kind of toilet line you get when you've got over a million people in one spot.


And, of course, the toilet queues you get at a festival where beer tents outnumber the vendor tents. Bier 3 euros; Vodka & Spek, 2.50.




Lolly stand!

After a couple of hours of browsing through stalls and admiring the sheer number of alcoholic options available, we came across a harassed-looking woman who, for a euro fifty, was able to load us up with all the sugar energy we needed to get back to the music stages once more. At least, with the number of people there I ended up with Maddyn on my shoulders for about four hours all up, so if nothing else I needed my strength! We trundled back through the enormous German barbecue stands, found a bier tent which kindly sold cola and apfelschorle (apple lemonade?) in glasses, and I shared a chicken curry with Maddyn outside an Indian stand quite hastily upon finding out that the plastic bowl I was using had a two euro pfand--a deposit that you can get back once you've returned the bowl.

All in all it was a spectacular day. My back and feet were glad of the seat I managed to finally get on the s-bahn when we were a few stops away from home, but I'd love to go again next year.

We never did find our neighbours.

Naked man park

We have been busy lately going to festivals with the Musician neighbours. They're so lovely, and very keen to show off Berlin.

The first festival we went to was the Peruvian festival. Alas instead of the outdoor festival we were all expecting it had been downsized to a large apartment with a few tables in a hallway for food and some Spanish karaoke. Oh, and some gorgeous artwork, which I wasn't quite sure if I should photograph so I didn't. We left quite quickly, went a-walking with the children, and popped into an American diner. I'm amused by the number of American diners here--I suppose I'm used to them in Australia, but American foods and the like aren't really as embraced over here (as opposed to the McDonalds on every corner that I'm used to). All of the kids at the table used the e-coli scare to carefully pick all of the salad from their plates, but it was generally quite delicious.

After lunch we went walking again--past little poles with beads decorating them!-- to a park. To access to the park one has to walk through the grounds of a gorgeous church. I left the kids playing with the others and went back to take a photo of the church only to find myself, camera out, in the middle of a park full of naked men. I'm getting more and more used to the idea of naked sunbathing here, and I think the idea is quite excellent, but I never expected to see naked sunbathing a) quite that close to a playground, nor b) in front of a church!
With the eyes of a dozen men on me and my camera I hastily angled the camera up, pointed, and took the photo as quickly as I could. Then I fled.

Honey, the ceilings are orange

This week has been really fun. Maddyn and I are getting into the habit of riding home from our English-speaking play group, we've done a great deal of baking, and I've met some new people who are becoming friendly. We've even had three social dinners this week: two with the neighbours across from us, who have a son Jill's age and a daughter a little younger than Maddyn, and then another neighbourhood barbecue tonight. Maddyn also has a routine of play dates with the girl whose mother recommended the kita (kindy) that he'll be starting at next month, and the two kids have been having a lovely time getting to know each other before starting there. Tonight's barbecue was an impromptu gathering, in honour of what will apparently be a very good soccer game, though we put the kids to bed rather than going across the way to watch it, but we had Jill's little boyfriend with us and it was all very lovely.

We actually had Boyfriend all day, which is always a delight. He's a great kid, and both kids just adore him. Unfortunately for him we had our first dud outing. We trundled out to Museum für Naturkunde, the natural history museum here. I'm afraid our expectations of museums are quite high--we've always liked the Queensland Museum, with its interactive displays, craft projects, and the dinosaur garden where you can picnic and where the kids can play on the dinosaur models--and this one didn't really make the grade. The dinosaur room is pretty cool: it's home to the world's largest mounted dinosaur skeleton, which is both enormous and brilliant. They've got a somewhat interactive display there, with on-screen dinosaur musculature, skin overlays, and videos of what the dinosaurs might have been like. Maddyn would have been happy to play with that for an hour, but the bigger kids were keen to explore so we trundled off into room after room of preserved specimens and a huge section on the preservation process. There are only so many stuffed rhinos, hippos, and deer that a three year-old can stand, and I'm afraid the 276000 vials of specimens in ethanol lost its appeal quicker than you could say, 'Hey, this could be the Potions store room.' Boyfriend was bored out of his mind, Maddyn tried to run away 2389723497 times, and every time any of us spoke it echoed through the eerily silent rooms, so we made our escape with a quarter of the building unexplored. Some of it was nifty, of course, but things like a mounted red fox on a blank exhibit with a caption describing an intention of invoking mental images of an abstract landscape or a snowy field really didn't hit its mark with any of the three kids. I really wouldn't recommend this museum for children.

I think the highlight of our trip was the ice cream shop at the Friedrichstraße s+u-bahn station. The ice cream there is amazing! I don't generally care all that much for ice cream, and I feel odd raving about it, but it was so good I'm tempted to take the kids there again just for the ice cream. Nom.

Friends and family will also be happy to find out that I've met a Brisbane guy here who doesn't work Wednesdays and who has access to the State of Origin. I don't know him well, so I don't think there'll be wine and cheese, but I'm much happier to know I won't miss out on the other games. Hooray!

I think that probably sums up all of our recent news. I ought to make a post some time about the dangers of moving heavy furniture without a spotter (or, indeed, any adults within shouting distance), but  for the moment I'm settling for nursing my incredibly bruised thigh and the swollen knee. I did install a coat rack, finally, which was very exciting. I've also been soliciting invitations to neighbours' houses to check out how everybody else has arranged their furniture, and I've been copying shamelessly. The small room is partially cleared now in preparation to install Jill and her key (it has a lockable door, to keep a certain small person from crashing her Sims games and/or breaking her DS when she's at school). I'm also hoping to paint the apartment at some point in the not too distant future to rid ourselves of the awkward orange ceilings, but haven't yet figured out how to do so with the furniture in the house nor what colours I really want. Decisions decisions.

Grunewald

Delayed post is delayed, and my apologies for that. My only excuse is housework.

On Sunday we had excellent company, who came on bikes with an enormous haul of bakery treats. There is seriously nothing like Germany for bakery treats. The plan was to go for a ride through Grunewald, a huge forest that just happens to be half an hour from the centre of Berlin. I don't even know how Berlin gets off being so fabulous: bakeries, clubs, amazing public transport infrastructure, enough shops to cater to millions of people, and then a forest of all things. If I were Berlin I'd be very smug, but it's remarkably humble for a capital city.

Humble and rainy, however, the latter of which being not the best attribute when you've planned a bike ride. I have no particular fear of melting if rain touches me, but I do have a fear of repeating a certain incident that happened in high school. The rain was pelting down around home time and I rode downhill from the school on my supposedly trusty black Malvern Star that I'd bought with my part-time job earnings (ah, memories. I loved that bike). There was a staircase at the bottom of the hill that was protected by a fence so people like me couldn't accidentally kill themselves. Probably for the best. At any rate, it turns out that the brakes on that particular bike didn't work at all when trying to stop from a fair speed whilst riding downhill in the rain, and I did the only thing I could think of: I abandoned ship. School shoes are, unfortunately, about as good as Malvern Star brakes and there was no way I could have stayed upright. I slid down that bitumen and I slid hard, my navy blue drill school skirt riding up to provide maximum skin contact with the bitumen. I shredded my right thigh, butt, and hip that day, and lost my glasses to boot. I even had to face the humiliation of asking somebody for help--double the humiliation, in fact, as without my glasses I had no idea before I spoke that the person I happened to approach was my arch nemesis who, of all things, called me a poor thing and actually helped me. The shame, I tell you!

To procrastinate instead of embark on another adventure like the aforementioned we went a-planting! Our delightful company had happened to bring a number of plants that had outgrown their balcony garden. We're a tad more suburban than they are and have actual ground (rather than footpath) around our apartment, so Jill set off with her trowel and supervised as my friend dug her a hole to plant our new sunflowers (pictured), and another little garden around the side of the flat. Jill then made a wee garden edge with pine cones.

At length we realised that Berlin was just threatening to rain and wasn't actually going to do anything about it, so we set off on our bikes to Grunewald. The sky cleared up as if by magic the second we got into the forest--doesn't it look amazing?--and we trundled through the paths to find 'Die Sandgrube' (which google rather hilariously translates to 'the sand pit'), sand dunes which stand on a site which is apparently an abandoned gravel mine. 


This is the view from the top of the highest sand hill.

 Die Sandgrube is a brilliantly family friendly place. Apparently the wildschwein--wild pigs--make actually camping there a rather bad choice, but there were heaps of families: kids running up and down the sand dunes, people playing football, various games of catch, frisbee, and even one person with a kite. We chose to sit on a makeshift picnic blanket and eat apples while the kids made a cubby house in the scrub, but it was super. It was also a really peaceful retreat from the city, unless of course the wind blowing just so and we could hear the roar of the Hertha football fans at Olympiastadion as their team won a game which qualified for them to gain a league promotion of some sort.

After a final trip up and down the biggest dune we set off so we could be home in time for dinner. The Grunewald s-bahn station is a kilometre or so down another track leading from die Sandgrube, though we stopped off at a lovely little cafe (sporting a biergarten, naturally) for ice cream on the way.

All in all another fabulous outing, and I'd absolutely go there again. There are signs and maps all through the forest to help you find die Sandgrube or any of the other gorgeous Grunewald attractions. The tracks are wide and quite fine for walking, jogging, or riding either bikes or horses! The path from the main track to die Sandgrube is not wheelchair friendly, and we couldn't find a lift at either Grunewald s-bahn station or a working lift at Westkreuz s-bahn station, but there is parking and the paths, albeit slightly gravelly dirt, are wide and seem to be fairly accessible.