It's Monday evening here - and we are going to leave Wednesday early morning. We really are nearly there!!
And my ticker is one day off...
I had my last day at work on Friday, but Saturday Katharina and I were once again busy volunteering for "our" exchange organization. Unfortunately we won't get a Disney Day for the day we gave, but that's fine.
Sunday I was battling a horrible headache - I tend to get these when the stress I had is over. Pretty annoying. But Katharina, Remy and I still managed to get pizza
and a movie. We finally saw another Disney movie!
It was the only one which Remy would consent to see as well: Mickey, Donald and Goofy as musketeers. I thought it was quite sweet. But Remy hated it because they were singing in it and he hates musicals. Well, he was the one who picked the film!
The pizza was a special cow's milk and tomato free variety. broduced by ourself! We used vegan pesto (which consisted of nuts, basil and olive oil) from a jar, parma ham, black olives and feta cheese (which is only sheep with a bit of goat). The first batch was rather dry and it was all a bit salty from the feta and the ham... In order to practice for WDW I took some food porn:
Today I was busy running errands (including having breakfast at my favourite cafe, which actually is run by an American living here in Berlin, so I had a lovely bagel with peanut butter with my coffee!
). I also had to drop off our birthday present for our mother at the post office, her birthday is on 2/2, so we will be in WDW then. I also finally hunted down some socks that can be worn in sneakers. We did not want the ones that are so short that they disappear into the shoe at the heel when you walk around a lot. Not easy finding summer socks in the middle of winter!! I had been checking all kind of department stores, even tried the flagship store, the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens - Department Store of the West). It was called that before there was an East and a West Berlin, but it ended up being in the West. It must be the most luxurious department store in Germany. Well, there they had some in strange colours like red, beige and black. All of these colours would not go with white sneakers (actually now, I realize that Katharina has red sneakers, she might have liked those red socks...
). So I was really disspointed, but since I was in Berlin's main shopping street, I ventured on. And just because I thought I should try even the faintest possibility, I went into the Puma store. Puma is a German sneaker brand (which when I was small nobody wanted to wear) which has become extremely trendy over the last years. Didn' t really expect to find practical socks there, but I did!!
And because I wanted three pair for each of us, I got two packets and they had an offer: 20 % off if you buy two items! So we each got three pair of socks for 6.36 € (about 9 $). They even show the brand name, so now we have very trendy socks for not much money. Those beige socks at the KaDeWe would have been 7 € for the pair!
Here are those wonderful socks!
And because I am having so much phone taking pics with my Iphone, here is the display in the KaDeWe for their "theme" at the moment, it is called "The Beautiful South":
The KaDeWe is most famous for their food department, which also stocks a number of delicacies from the US:
And then I went to see a film tonight and passed by Checkpoint Charlie, a very famous crossing point between the Soviet and the American sector, i.e. between East and West Berlin, during the cold war. It is now just a copy of the original guard house there, but it is a huge tourist attraction. The picture was taken from the American side towards the Soviet sector. I think it shows very well what it meant to the city to be divided like that.
AS you might be able to see from the picture, there still is snow on the ground. We had freezing temperatures for nearly all of January so far and the last few days have been really cold again. We have around -10 °C here as our high temperatures, that's around 15 °F. We are making ourselves much too nervous about the Orlando weather, but so far it looks like the high for Wednesday there is supposed to be 20 °C and that's quite a big jump.
20 °C are about 68 °F. Not hot, but warm enough for us!! And it is supposed to warm up a bit more: 77 °F on Friday....
Unfortunately it looks like we won't be able to make use of those temperatures at the AKL pool.
The refurb was supposedly extended until mid February. The good news is however that there is a nice shuttle at the moment going between Jambo and Kidani. So at least we will make sure that we check out the Kidani pool. And the spas at Jambo are open!
I will check in tomorrow. Perhaps I will even manage to get another DLP update going. This really fits much more into a PTR than a TR...