Dad Visits

On Friday, the first rainy day after about four weeks of warm weather and sunshine, I headed to Tegel airport to pick up my Dad. Although only technically in Berlin for two days of a conference, he decided to come early to spend some time with me and enjoy Berlin.

After taking a coffee at the airport and checking into the hotel (which was conviently right across from where I live), we decided to walk around Mitte (the center of town, where I live). Of course, as soon as we walk out of the building the drizzle turns into a full-on down pour. Luckily it only lasted a couple of minutes and by the time we got to Alexanderplatz it had already stopped.


[Dad by the World Clock by Alex(anderplatz)]

Having been a year since my Dad was last in Berlin, a lot had already changed. Especially by Alex, the scenery is always changing with old communist buildings being town down and new shopping malls being built. While I took the picture in front of the World Clock, he had no idea that we were standing right in the middle of Alexanderplatz! We had to walk back so that he could re-examine and see what had changed.

From there we walked down Unter den Linden, and began talking about a subject that has been on my mind lately, which is my Modern Languages and Linguistics Honors Thesis that I will be writing next year. Right now I have to come up with a topic to write about and begin doing some preliminary research before the beginning of next semester. Since the thesis will be about 30-40 pages, this is really something that I need to synthesize and start working on now, especially if I want to use resources that may only be available here in Germany.


[Dad in the Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz]

Around 6, we wanted to watch the next soccer game, and I thought the best place would be Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center, which has a huge screen. When we got there, we realized that there wasn't a single restaurant that had the game playing, and it wasn't on the big screen. This was a huge surprise to me, since almost every little dinky restaurant and doner kebab stand had some sort of TV playing the the games.

We decided to head back to Unter den Linden and get a coffee instead. We were more interested in seeing the Netherlands play France later anyway.


[Dad in Cafe Einstein]

We finally ended up watching the game at a little Doner Kebab fast-food place near Alexanderplatz. Although it was a really small place, they had a big-screen high-def TV playing the game, which was enjoyed with a beer and a falafel sandwich. The Netherlands looked like a great team and won against France (2 place in the last World Cup) 4-1. From there, we went to bed early since we had to be up early the next morning for the first day of our boat trip.


[The Spree River and the Berliner Dom; by the end of the day the weather cleared up and we were hoping for nice weather for our boat trip]