This week I get to be a tourist again! Nina's cousin, Brigita, is visiting until sunday from Bavaria. Mr. Thiermeier says this will be a great opportunity for me to hear real "bavarian" german.
Until now, I haven't really heard many other german dialects spoken except for Hochdeutsch, and a lot of people speaking hochdeutsch with a regionally influenced accent. This will be my first time hearing actual "dialect"!
Brigita arrived in the morning via plane. It's a pretty short flight from Ingolstadt (where she lives) to here, only about 45 minutes. After she got here, all of us minus Mr. Thiermeier headed over to Potsdamer Platz. We ended up driving and parking nearby there, and walking the last quarter mile or so. It was again brutally hot, so we stayed in the shade where we could.
It was hot...
At Potsdamer Platz, there is a theater where they put on a lot of musicals. Currently they are showing the musical based on the movie Dirty Dancing. We actually got tickets and are going to see it thursday night! We all enjoyed standing inside the entrance to the theater (where the ticket counter is), as they actually have air conditioning inside...
After that, we walked through the Sony Center, and then up the road to the Jewish Holocaust Memorial. After stopping for a minute, we walked over to Brandenburger Tor (took a few pics of course), and then over to the Reichstag. Behind the Reichstag is a place on the river with stairs, ideal for cooling off your feet on a hot day.
My feet this time - and no, my leg's aren't actually that pale (the water's a lot darker, so to get the exposure right for the water, the legs came out looking a lot paler)
After that, we went to a cafe and grabbed something to drink. We headed back soon after. I went and did my daily run, practiced some, and then came back up for dinner. I was surprised to see that Mrs. Thiermeier had cooked up some bavarian specialties, including "roulladen" and "knödel".
Knödel (on the red plate) are a kind of large potato dumpling. They are made by cooking potatoes, mashing them, adding a little flower, salt, and a couple other spices, rolling the mash into balls, and cooking them in hot water. Roulladen are pieces of meat rolled around a pickle, and then cooked in the oven in a water bath. It tastes incredibly good, a bit like beef stew. Besides that, we had the normal salad and drinks.
I stayed upstairs for a while, then went downstairs to go to bed.
