Snow!! And Bek's birthday!

Gutentaag, fan club! Yesterday we left Amsterdam early in the morning (way, way too early) after Bek opened her presents. :) Grandma rang, and so did Mumsie, and we had a fantabulous breakfast of croissants, yoghurt, toasted muesli, fruit, toast, juice, and quark. For those of you unfamiliar with quark, it's like mousse, but youghurt flavoured. But really, we just like it because it sounds funny. We managed our flight from Amsterdam to Berlin with just a small nap, and were told on arriving that it was -7 degrees outside. There was about a foot and a half of snow at the airport, and they were coping with it much better than Belfast or London, who only had a couple of inches and were in a panic. It wasn't really that cold, but we think it was the lack of wind - it felt a lot colder in London.

So, everything is in German. Everything. The helpful scary lady at the airport gave us the biggest map known to man (apparently Berlin is over 8 times the size of Paris) of just the city centre. Unfortunately, the airport wasn't on the map, so while on the bus to Olivaer Platz (we think it's like a suburb) we were trying desperately to find any streets that might be on the map so we could find out which direction we were heading in. Whilst reading out street names like Kurfurstendamm, Gneisenau Strasse, and Freiherr-Vom-Stein, we managed to find Olivaer Platz. It's kind of like a big oval, and the street runs around it. We started at one point of the oval, and walked all around trying to find our hotel. Eventually, with some help from the locals, we found the hotel right around the other side. Some of the Germans speak English, but not everyone like we found in Holland.

We got to our hotel about 11.30am, and the receptionist was really lovely, and told us we could wash our clothes, which we did. Yay! Clean clothing again! We took turns sleeping all afternoon, and emerged about tea time to go and have dinner at the Italian Restaurant. Yes, Italian again. We haven't even gotten to Italy yet and all she wants is Italian. So the restaurant - a interesting experience. As we speak little Italian and even littler German, and the waitress spoke fluent German but little English, we had some difficulty understanding the menu. The menu would have the Italian food option, with a German translation underneath, and then an almost English translation under that. Sometimes, though, they didn't quite know the English word for something, so would just put the German word again, so it would be like 'Pizza with basil and parmekanskase' which was a little confusing. From guessing, and Bek knowing some of the Italian words (like pizza, and pasta), and our waitress being fantastic at charades, we ordered lasagne and cabonara. We tried to get a birthday candle for Bek's tiramasu, but the owner didn't really like that idea. The funniest part was when Bek decided we had to have coffee after dessert. The poor coffee girl had been eyeing us the entire meal, as we were the only customers in the place, and finally she looked excited that we were ready for coffee. So I asked Bek what she wanted, and she said mocha, or cappuccino if they don't know what a mocha is (see previous examples of people not knowing food/drink that we are used to). So I went up and asked if she made mochas, and she said 'no, only expresso' and I said, what about cappuccino? And she said 'yes, yes cappuccino' So I asked for 2 cappuccinos to go, and we sat back down. After a while our coffees came, and they were 2 double shot expressos. With no milk. So funny! They had given us those little bar fridge milk things, and we put one in and made no difference whatsoever to the colour. We ended up tipping them in the snow. :) One awesome point, though, is that Bek got to practice her Italian! To an Italian! She said 'grazie' (thanks) and he said 'prego, arreviderci' (you're welcome, goodbye) and she said 'buona notte' (good night). So cool!

We had the best sleep of our holiday, sleeping in til 11am (we so needed it). After a light breakfast of (yay!) toast, Bek made us some ravioli (because we haven't had enough Italian food) which was really nice. We set out to explore the city in -8 degrees, discovering our hotel is on the Park Lane of Berlin. We saw some small souvenir shops, like Gucci, Prada, Rolex, Cartier and Chanel, but decided against buying them for anyone because they didn't have 'Berlin' on them. We made snow angels (I made a snow angel, Bek wussed out) and we even had the iconic German drink, beer - in a stein. At least that's what we ordered, not really sure if it was a stein. We're encountering a few language barriers here. We have bought some day tour tickets for tomorrow, seeing as that seems to be the best way to see the city in a day, and we have clean clothes! :)

Hoping to see the remains of the Berlin Wall, and the Jewish Holocaust Museum, amongst other things. We also have directions to a resteraunt for tomorrow night, to sample some of Germany's finest snitchel. Looking forward to it!

We also tried actual German sausage - bockwurst (both of us, seeing as it was the only thing on the menu that we could conclusively say was a sausage) and had it with German mustard (pants are busted) and ketchup. If you say tomato sauce here, they just get confused and upset.

Tonight we had to wander a fair bit to find some grub (against Bek's plea for more Italian - whimper) but we eventually found a resonably priced grill house thingy which had steak and burgers. (We had initially tried for a French looking restaurant, but to my dismay we discovered it was in fact an Italian restaurant.) This one was nice, but Bek's steak was still mooing, even after sending it back. It was supposed to be medium. As we don't have a photo, I googled it and came up with one that looked fairly similar. After sending it back, it came back slightly seared on the outside, but the same on the inside. But they did give her more pepper sauce, which was rather friendly of them.

Other than that, waiter was really nice, spoke English (yay!) and gave me a new knife when I threw mine on the floor. So out we went, full as a goog, into the -18 (supposedly) winter wonderland. It was, however, very very cold. Took a while for our noses and ears to defrost.

Anyhoo, catch you all later!

Love,

Bek and Belle

p.s. Sorry, no embarrassing moments for today. (That'll be a first)

Except, we aren't sure how to cross the road. They have the usual thingies that you press for the little red man to turn green, but no button to press, just these yellow boxes, and we have no idea how they work! Maybe a sensor? Seems a bit high tech. Weird, anyway.