I Tried, But Still No Pictures

I'm going to have to learn how to just write.  I tried using a a flash drive that was here and the whole computer got sick and had to be rebooted.  So pictures will have to wait until I can use my own computer.  I'm learning where the ' is and the z and y are, but still mix them a bit.

Beautiful day today, so we spent a lot of time just in the backyard enjozing the sunshine and birds and flowers.  We also did laundry and hung it out to dry.  In the late afternoon we took the subway to the area that houses the old Checkpoint Charlie and the new Jewish Museum.  I know that I went through Checkpoint Charlie in 1964 to go into East Berlin.  It was a verz eerie feeling, like going into no-man's land.  But today there is a little box in the middle of the street with sandbags in front and some copies of old signs (good writers shouldn't need pictures, right?  I should be writing so lushly that you can imagine it all) and a cute young German in a soldier uniform mugging with the tourists for 1 Euro per picture.  Traffic drives by on both sides.

Several blocks away is the starkly built Jewish Museum.  When we were here last in 2001 it wasn't open yet.  It's silvery with gashes for windows and it's built like a trainwreck, with cars connected but pointing in different directions. It's is one piece, but makes jagged angled turns.   There are police out in front and no cars are allowed to stop near the building.  We didn't think we had enough time to do justice to the exhibits so we looked through the bookstore.  I'm not completely sure I want to see it.  But it isn't a holocaust museum, if I understand it right, it's a museum about the Jews of Germany and their contributions and experiences.  So it does include WW II.   There were lots of folks there.  We grabbed another subway for two stops to find a waterfall that was in the guidebook in a nearby park.  We stumbled into a big park - Victoria Park - with a huge football field, beer garden, playground, and a hill.  I'm still trying to figure out whether it was natural or man made since Berlin is so flat.  The light was beautiful and many people were sitting on the grass enjoying the warm weather.  Picture looking down the slope of green grass with lots of young bodies sprawled out in groups with trees surrounding the opening and etherial light on the edges.  It's in my camera and you'll recognize it when I finally get to post the pictures.

The waterfall wasn't as nice as the picture in the book, but it was nice going through the park.  We came out on Kreutzberg which turns into Bergmannstrasse (sorry, I was trying to find the double s symbol and somehow it posted and I'm not done yet.  I'll leave this up but keep writing.)