For more than a week, it has been brutally hot here in berlin. According to the Thiermeiers, it hasn't been so hot here in more than 10 years. We've had several days in a row of temps over 100, and every day has been at least 90. Unfortunately it hasn't been cooling off at night, so opening the windows doesn't cool the apartment down at all. I've been lucky being on the ground floor, so it stays noticeably cooler than in the Thiermeier's apartment (usually is about 5 to 10 degrees cooler). But even my apartment is getting hot. So, to try to beat the heat, the thiermeiers and I went to a lake to go swimming for the day.
We ended up driving there, instead of taking the u-bahn as usual. It took about 30 minutes to get there (not including the time to pic up one of Nina's friends who was coming with us). After parking, we had to walk for a stretch through the woods to get there.
The lake is called Teufelsee (Devil Lake). I'm not sure where the germans got the naming system for their lakes, but it's rather hilarious. One lake is called the "slaughter" lake, and this one is called the "devil" lake...
The lake itself was really nice, albeit incredibly crouded. Also, a lot of nudists were there...new experience for me. The water was really comfortable though, perfect for escaping the heat.
I went swimming for about an hour, and then came back on shore and read under a tree for a while. I'm still working my way through The Languages of Japan (a descriptive grammar of Japanese and Ainu) by Masayoshi Shibatani. Shibatani is one of my professors next semester, for a class on the structure of japanese. Since I have absolutely no background in the language (and they recommended having 2 years), I figured reading the textbook ahead of time might be useful.
After we were done swimming, we stopped at an old factory that was converted into a wildlife preservation/school/cafe to get something to drink as well a slice of cake.
Here are some pics from there:
The Old Factory
In the Gardens
Bees!
Amazing clouds
All the pics were taken on my new camera. It does actually a surprisingly good job considering how compact it is.
