Top 10 list

Top Ten Things We Love
about Living in Berlin . . .
by the Zetzsche Kids

10. Escalators. (No, we're not rednecks.)



9. Sightseeing and learning the history.


8. Church bells ringing throughout the day.


7. Castles and churches and beautiful buildings.


6. Concerts - we went to an open air concert with about 15 different bands playing simultaneously on different stages about 100 yards apart along a designated road. It was awesome!



5. Public transportation:
subways, buses, streetcars, taxis, and trains.



4. Shopping! Shopping! Shopping!
3. Riding bikes on bike paths throughout the city.


2. Having a beautiful park and lake (and basketball court and playground)
a block away from our apartment.

1. Food!!! It's all good: Fresh bread and breakfast rolls every morning, curry wurst, Turkish roasted veal in pita bread, German pancakes, and restaurants from every country in the world right in our neighborhood.

Guten Appetit!!!

Arrival

Ja! Wir sind da!

Yes, we're really here! They tell us it takes us a lifetime to become a Berliner, so we won't be making any claims to that yet, but we are beginning to settle in and find our way around this beautiful city.

After a remarkably easy 24-hour trip with our ten overloaded suitcases and assorted hand luggage, we arrived on the doorstep of Neue Kantstrasse 3 at about noon on Tuesday. Here's Anna posing by the front door of our apartment building, built in grand style in 1906.

The kids get a kick out of pushing the doorbell by our name on this door, speaking through the intercom to our apartment, and being automatically buzzed in.

After passing through a marbled hallway we squeeze into a tiny, rickety elevator built 50 years ago (capacity four persons, but we count Lara and Anna as one!), and rise slowly up five floors to our "penthouse apartment." Here's our entryway. We're learning which of these creaky floorboards to avoid when we have to make nighttime trips to the bathroom!

This is our living room, a wide open space with parquet floors, ceilings that must be 16 feet high, and wonderful double doors with stained glass windows. I wish I could have seen this apartment in its youth. When we first arrived this was being used as the playroom for the actual tenant's four small children. The girls and I had watched HGTV's "FreeStyle" program on the flight from Salt Lake City to New York, so we whirled into rearranging action and came up with this serene space. Now if only we could make that futon more comfortable!

Tada! The girls' bedroom, another large space with two futons, two desks, a wardrobe, and a cute little balcony that looks into the center courtyard. This is a peaceful room for hanging out and catching the cool summer breezes from the garden below.

And Hannes's room, plastered with basketball, baseball, and soccer stars . . . only the drum set is missing!


Lara insists on writing this caption: "The Ugliest Bathroom in the World!" Yes, well, perhaps it's not the ugliest, but it does leave some things to be desired. Surely harvest gold is retro and hip?!?

Anna eating an apple in our kitchen. Our kitchen includes a washing machine, a dishwasher, a relatively large refrigerator with a freezer, a microwave, and a gas range with a non-functioning oven. I've always been afraid of gas appliances, so I feel like I've really accomplished something here by learning to cook on the stovetop!

And that's our new home for a year! We are comfortable here and settling in well. We have a list of things we'd still like to find at a flea market--little things we take for granted like salt and pepper shakers, some glasses that aren't plastic, a ladle for soup--but we feel very blessed.

Bis zum nächsten Mal,

Familie Zetzsche