Knorr Family Adventures

Second day in Berlin was a bit less adventurous.   We visited DDR Museum which had a decent amount of things basically from my childhood.   It had an apartment set up in the style of 80s with chachkies like egg holder, telephone,etc.     The boys loved it because the museum is interactive – you can climb into a car, turn the knobs on the stove,   use the typewriter!  They had no idea what a cassette player is Notice the pictures on the wall behind - Marx and Lenin Then we wondered around Berlin down to the Tiergarten where we found a large playground.   Tiergarten is somewhat equivalent to Central Park in NYC with a minor difference of Tiergarten dating back to 16th century.  On the playground there was a large group of refugee kids playing so we got talking to adults with them.   Apparently, there is a charity organization that takes kids from the refugee camps and brings them to playgrounds.   The supervisors...

In Berlin we rented a house which was about 20-25 minutes away from Check Point Charlie.   The house itself was interesting; it had 2 bedrooms upstairs where the boys slept (Andrei and Anton shared a bed) and Ilya got his own room.   We slept in the bedroom downstairs which opened up to the living room.   It honestly felt like a summer house for inner city Berliners.   The best part was the yard.   It was large enough for us to play soccer. The entire time we were in Berlin the weather was absolutely beautiful.   On the first day, we left the house around 10AM and came back around 6PM having walked the entire time.   We started with Check Point Charlie and Berlin Wall museum.   The museum was very small but very informative and very crowded.   The problem we encountered is trying to explain to boys how the wall came to be and how it went down.   It’s just not something that they seem to understand.   Then we stopped for lunch ...

A couple of weekends ago was a holiday weekend in Germany, so decided to fill a gap on our map and headed out to Berlin with a stopover in Dresden.    We booked 2 rooms at Holiday Inn in Zwickau because having 5 people makes you over the limit for a double room.   Well, the hotel was super nice and gave us 3 rooms; 2 adjoining and one right across the hall.   Andrei and Ilya got to sleep in their own room and loved it.   Dresden was lovely but cold; thankfully, I remembered our   trip to Amsterdam last year and took hats and gloves.     Dresden is lovely touristy city – it has lots of walking streets and during this particular times it was busy but not crazy.   We found   a nice place to eat and were serviced pretty quickly which is always a good thing when eating out with 3 active busy boys.   After lunch we decided to go on a horse drawn carriage ride and fun was had by all.   The ride itself is about 30 minutes ...

The size of our backyard is a comical, and when days get warm I long for the big yard we had in Pittsburgh.  Currently, we have our grill and boy's water-table but that's it.  Two weekends ago Chris decided to come up with a plan to expand usable space.  After a day and half he actually executed on his plan and now we have double the space that we used to!  He still has to cut and attach that last board that is currently just leaning against the deck but not bad for not even 2 days of work. P.S. There is a one story-drop under the deck so it wasn't safe or usable prior to this little construction. 

Last weekend Andrei and Ilya ran "marathon" with their Ilya's school.  It was called Lauf fur Mehrsprachigkeit which roughly translates as Running is Multilingualism. The sponsors of the run are bilingual schools around Frankfurt including our school Katharina die Grosse Schule amongst Italian, Spanish, and Polish schools to name a few:)  I signed up the boys to run 900 meters; Anton could of done 200 meters but didn't.  Adults can do either 5K or 10K run and again we didn't do it.  Maybe next year?  Ilya's school also put on a little show where they sang and danced.  Oh, and unfortunately for us it was the most miserable (weather-related) day in over a week - it rained, it hailed and it was freezing.  Andrei had 2 pairs of socks, 2 t-shirts, 2 sweaters  and a jacket on; and Andrei being Andrei he decided to walk part of the way!  Ilya's results - 5:49, 34th place out of 60.  Andrei - 6:20; 25th place out of 66.  Pittsburgh mara...