A couple of weeks ago, Vigo and I took a Sunday excursion to Potsdamer Platz, to Legoland. This is sort of a deluxe indoor playground with a Lego theme.
They have a prety cool play area where you can build and test cars on a big ramp, build towers and test their structural integrity on an earthquake simulator, build elaborate houses, and so on.
They also have a little Miniland version of Berlin. This is a picture of the rock concert in front of the Miniland Reichstag.
We were at the Legoland place for a few hours. A nice 3-D movie is included in the fairly reasonable price of admission. For an indoor playground, it was fairly un-hell-like. The grown ups there didn't look like they were dying inside. A lot of us were playing legos. I personally spent a long time at the earthquake simulator trying to figure out why the 12-year-old next to me was able to build a gigantic indestructible tower while mine kept crumbling like shanty towns. Vigo, of course, was in heaven.
After a few hours we went out into the nighttime glory of Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center, which is a really impressive building.
We were thinking about getting something to eat when we noticed that we were just in time to catch the beginning of Wall-E, which I hadn't seen yet. So we got some popcorn and popped into the multiplex before catching the bus home. I always enjoy going to the movies with Vigo. We should really do it more often.
On our way to the bus we noticed this exciting Tubing hill. Maybe we'll go back one day and try it out. Potsdamer Platz is also one of the places where you can still see parts of the Berlin Wall standing.
On election night, we took Vigo to the Democratic election party at the Babylon Theater, not far from our house. We brought along Vigo's sleeping bag and a pillow an found a good spot at the back of the theater, on the floor. The party started at about 9 and Vigo was asleep by about 10. Erik and I took turns hanging out with Vigo while the other one got to go mill around in the crown and talk to the people outside who hadn't been able to get tickets to get in. Because there are no open container laws here, if you have a party that overflows like this one did, you set up a little tent on the sidewalk and sell the overflow crowd beers. They had a big projection screen out there and a pretty nice, mild night.
We woke Vigo up at about 6 to hear the victory speech and then we biked home and had breakfast. I went to the school daycare at 8 am as usual to help supervise the kids, even though I hadn't slept yet. After that Erik went out for some breakfast before a nap. Vigo wasn't too tired Wednesday during the day, but he fell asleep pretty early that night.
Another great event since the last post is that we bought a sofa-bed. Renting a truck to go out and get the bed was a little bit of an adventure all in itself, but Erik pulled it off thanks to finding his French driver's license. Erik and I are not sleeping on the floor anymore, so my mood has greatly improved. Vigo is still in his camping gear, but he isn't complaining. He wants to design and build his own bed/rocket when we finally get into our permanent apartment. Here are a couple pictures of our living space.
Erik and Vigo used some of the packaging materials from the couch to do a little Saturday art project.
Last week, on Tuesday night, we went to an art opening that one of the other parents at Vigo's school was involved in. They were doing a video project with this soap-bubble artists they had met at a cabaret show called, "Soap." The kids were all mesmerized and we had a great time.
A lot of Vigo's classmates turned up for the opening and Erik took some of the kids to a little park around the corner for a little while. Unfortunately, Vigo's bike, which had a joint in the center of the frame, and springs, came apart at that joint while he was at the little park. Erik tried to strap Vigo's bike to his own to get it home, but the weight of Vigo's bike made the frame of Erik's bike twist in an nasty way and he ended up with his derailer in the spokes of his back tire. We ended up attaching the two bikes to a post. The boys took the train home and I met them on my bike.
Erik tried to fix Vigo's bike unsuccessfully and last weekend we got him a new, better bike. It has a great light, and a back rack, and is less generally bouncy.
Vigo is still enjoying school a lot. He's also starting to speak some German and his German teacher says that he understands pretty much everything in class. He's been reluctant to write for a long time now, but he's also starting to get over that some. He's working on a story about a character called Squirmy Wormy. He's been typing it up on the computer and I imagine that he will post it to the blog when he's done with it. He's very interested in blogging and trying to figure out some things in html lately.
The sun is going down pretty early here--at about 4:30 in the afternoon. It's 2:30 now, so Erik and I are going to get a little walk in before it gets really dark!
