The Weather warmed up...and the Clothes came off!

Today is a beautiful day.  It is warm and sunny.  Just right for a bike ride through the park.  Unfortunatly, a lot of other people thought it was a good sun bathing day.  In Berlin, it is not against the law to sunbath nude.  There were several men laying on the grass in the park taking in the sun and letting it all out!(sorry, no pictures).

After leaving the park, we rode to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Euorpe.  The memorial consists of a"Field of Stelae" covering an area of 19000 square meters and containing 2711 concrete blocks of all different sizes, plus an information center.  It is an exhibition about the persecution and extermination of the Euorpean Jews.  As you walk amoung the concrete blocks, you get a sense of being trapped with no where to go.  The walk ways between them are narrow and many of the blocks are much taller then you are.  The information center is full of individual stories about people that were murdered or just "disappeared", never to be heard from again.  It included letters they wrote, diary intries that spoke of the terror they felt and of the hopelessness they experienced.  One room showed pictures of families and then told what happened to esch of the members.  Most were murdered.  Only a few escaped and they didn't have anything to go back to.  The life they knew before the Holocoust did not exist anymore. 

We then left the memorial and made our way to the Brandonburg Gate and then up past the Russian Memorial.  It honors the many Russians that were murdered in the war.  One thing I hadn't realized was that Hitler's influence reached out all over Euorpe all the way to Grease, Macedonia, and beyond. It wasn't just German Jews he wanted to eradicate, but the enire Jewish race on earth.

Super Hero's are All Around Us

Last night was our YSA"s Super Hero Dance.  What a hoot!  The cultural hall was decorated to the max.  The kids spent 2 weeks making decorations and then 3 days putting them up.  Most of the kids came dressed up in their favorite super hero costume.  They looked amazing.  Dan and I kept the kitchen running and took pictures of the kids.  When the kids would get tired or hot, they would come into the kitchen and talk with us and then out to dance again.  The Germans love to dance.  The dance ran from 1900-0100.  We had about 100 YSA's attend.  When the dance was over, they cleaned up and the building looked better then when they started.  We are very impressed with our young adults.  Today, they are meeting up at Potsdamer Platz and doing "Super Hero"  things.  I am not sure what that means, I guess I'll find out tomorrow at church when I see them.

Check Point Charlie

Today we went to Check Point Charlie.  As I stood at the place where freedom was taken away from the people, I couldn't help but think how amazing it was that the church was able to build a Temple behind the Berlin Wall.  There is much construction around Check Point Charlie.  They are building a museum on the corner across from the check point.  I hope it is finished before we leave Berlin, I would like to see it.  There are big poster board storied along the road telling about the different things that happened to create East and West Berlin.  The actual wall went up in 1961.  It virtually went up over night.  So many families separated because of the wall.  The people had no warning, up until that time, they could go back and forth from east to west. 

After gong to Check Point Charlie, we went to the Topography of Terror Museum. It is a somber looking gray building with no plants around it, just cement. There is a large portion of the Berlin Wall standing there.  The museum itself tells the story of the Gestapo, and the SS.  It also tells the story of the  Reich Security Main Office.  The pictures are all black and white.  They tell a bleak story of desperation, hopelessness, and courage.  They also depict a people who were ruthless, and evil.  You could feel the presence of evil in a lot of the pictures of the Hitler Regime.  You could also feel the hopelessness and fear in the pictures of the Jewish people as they were gathered up and forced into labor camps.  I also learned about how Hitler was cleaning up his own race, eliminating old, sick, mentally ill, and children that were considered "unable to work".  So many people were murdered.  It is hard to comprehend.  Satan's influence was all around, in every picture you looked at and in every story you read. 

Believe It or Not!

Believe it or not, I got too warm in my pink coat today.  The sun was out, the temp about 13*C and there was no wind.  I never put on my gloves today.  It sure was nice. 

Our Friday started out with us having to go Ammeld.  That means that we have to register where we are living because we are auslanders..  We found the place easy enough, but it turned out we had to prove that we were living in our apartment.  I called the Mission Home and they will send me a signed letter that says we live here, then we have to go back again next week and Ammeld.  When it is time to go home, we have to do the same thing in reverse, telling them we are leaving the country. 

We then went to the Post to pick up a package, but the date wasn't clear on the card the postman left.  We have to go back tomorrow to get it.  It hadn't been filled to be picked up yet.

We decided to go to the Berliner Dom Church.  It is a big Protestant Cathedral by Museum Island.  It was built in the late 1800's during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm ll.  The church has been in existence since 1608.  The smaller buildings were torn down and a large Cathedral was built.  In May of 1944, a fire bomb hit it and it burned down.  They started rebuilding in 1975.  In 1993, after 18 years, it was rededicated.  It is still used for worship services today.  There is a outside walkway around the top of the dome that you can walk on and look out over the city.  The city is very flat.  We could not see a hill any where.  There are 270 steps up to the walk way.  We then went down into a crypt room.  There were 94  crypts in the room.  Some of them are very ornate and some were very plain.  I guess it depended on your wealth and who you were if you got a ornate crypt.   We walked into the main chapel.  It was very large and very ornate.  It had a pipe organ that was just a bit smaller then the one in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.  The domed ceiling was beautiful.  It depicted the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount.  There were beautiful sculptures all around the ledges above the columns.  The windows were of beautiful stained glass depicting scenes of Christ and his life and death.

The Elders came to dinner tonight.  We enjoy spending time with them and the Sisters.  Next week, transfers come out and 2  of them will probably be transferred.  We don't like this time, it feels like we are losing our "children" every time one of them is transferred.   

Rookie....

A week ago it snowed for about 4 hours in the morning.  The snowflakes were big and fluffy, beautiful.  It was a wet snow.  The storm dropped about 2-3 inches in the morning and then was gone.  Elder Johnson being the good missionary and person he is, decided to go to the church and shovel the front and back walkways.  He spent about 2 hours shoveling snow.  The walk ways looked good.  That evening, it started to rain.  It didn't rain hard, just a slow drizzle and the temp was warming.  We went to bed that night with snow still on the ground, but awoke to no snow!  No snow anywhere!  It had all melted during the night.  When Elder Johnson looked outside in the morning and saw there was no snow to be found, he laughed and said "Rookie Mistake."  The California boy will know for next time it snows if the temp isn't colder and there is rain in the forecast to wait a little while before running out to shovel the snow.

A visit to the Museum

Yesterday we went to the Pergamon Museum with Elder Liegty and Elder Angerhofer.  We entered the museum and went to the panoramic view of Asisi of Greece.  It was magnificient.  It was a circular view , 5 stories high of life in ancient Greece.  It started with mornings first light.  You could hear the birds begin to waken as the sun came up.  The noise of the city increasing with the progression of the day.  You felt like you were there.  As the day drew to a close, the noise  became less, and the lights started coming on in the houses.  The night sky became dark and crickets began chirping. This continued through the night until the dawn began again.  You could stand and watch from 3 different levels.  Each level gave you a different feeling and you saw different things.  Unfortuneately, no pictures were allowed in this exhibit.  After leaving the panorama, we went through the rest of the museum.  It had many ruins from ancient Greece to look at.  It is incredible that the people of that time could build those kind of structures with the intricate detail they had.  They were very skilled at their jobs.  We spent about 3 1/2 hours walking around, looking at the many ruins and recreations of that time.   

Someone has some explaining to do...

We live next door to the Syrian Embassy.  The Syrian's that live in Germany are not happy with the Syrian Government and they protest outside the Embassy once in a while.  There is a blockade fence around the embassy and police guards 24 hour a day, 7 days a week.  It was a bit surprising when last Sunday as we walked by the embassy building on our way to church that we noticed the building had been graffitied with red spray paint.  Since that time, the police presence has increased but I wonder where they were the night of the spray painting.  I imagine someone has some explaining to do.  I found out that it has been spray painted before and had to be sandblasted to get the paint off.  As of 1 week later, it is still not cleaned up and there are usually 2 vans full of police just sitting outside the embassy waiting.  It is kind of like shutting the gate after the cows escape.

Last Sunday we went to the Mattias home for dinner.  They are an English family who moved to Germany almost 20 years ago because of employment.  What a lovely, talented family they are.  Sister Mattias and her 4 daughters are all musically gifted.  The oldest plays the harp like I've never heard beore.  The other girls play the piano, organ, and violin, viola, and flute.  They quite often play for us in Sacrament meeting.  They do not have a car, so we all went on the bus to their home.  It was snowing and it was cold.  Sister Mattias got dinner in the oven and we had hot chocolate and visited for awhile.  When Sister Mattias went to check on dinner she found that her oven was not working.  Dinner was not cooked.  She had to call the neighbors and use their oven to cook dinner.  When we finally ate, it was very good, chicken and broccoli pie, potatoes, rote kohl, and corn.  We then had to wait for dessert, rubarb cobbler, to cook.  It was all worth the wait.  We sat around the table chatting.  The girls wanted to know how Elder Johnson and I met.  We also heard how the Mattias' met.  We were at their home fo 5 hours.  We took the bus home, it was still lightly snowing.

Today, Sunday, Brother Celnap invited us for lunch.  He cooked in the church kitchen.  He is a single middle aged man, very nice, but a little different.  He invited some others to help cook and eat.  I sat watching Hines, Sebastian, Kurt, Hardy, and Leno all run around the kitchen getting lunch ready.  They cooked rice with a bunch of veggtables(canned), and hamburger in a sauce.  I was a little bit worried, but it was very good.  Hines said it was his mother's recipe.  She calls it chinese food, but there was nothing about it that was Chinese. 

I have also posted a couple of pictures that show the canal by our house frozen, and a public toilet thatI couldn't believe.  Look closely at the top and read it's title.  Also,  one picture shows ice forming a mound where the water drips and freezes because it is so cold.  The temp hasn't been abouve 0*c in 3 weeks, staying mostly-5*C or lower.  This weeks forecast shows the temp rising to 4*C by Friday with snow showers on and off.  We will see if it holds true.  It isn't much fun riding our bikes to the store in minus degree weather.

We also had the opportunity to meet Elder Texeira this week.  He was here in Berlin doing a Zone Council with the Zone leaders in our mission.  We helped Elder and Sister Monson cook lunch for the Elder Texeira and the Elders.  Sister Monson went all out; she had Portugal flags on the cake, chicken enchiladas, rice and salad.  She had fresh tulips on the tables.  It looked very nice.  The Monson's work in the mission office and will be going home at the end of March.