Every so often you get a really good cuddle. I choose to interpret it as Allie saying “Remember that photo you took of me earlier? Make me famous on the Internet.”
And so here we are:
photo
10
Jul 15
In Tower Bridge
Here are a few photos from a terrific day in London. See more of it here.
Except for the pedestrian sidewalk, I did not know you could walk across the Tower Bridge. You can do it indoors, across the top. And there are places where you can stand on a window and look down at the bridge and the Thames:
She did a handstand there, but I don’t have a copy of those pictures.
We walked across the pedestrian part of the bridge, too. Got photobombed for our troubles:
And here’s the bridge in the background, as seen from London Tower:
9
Jul 15
My feet were hurting by then
(Another look back at being a tourist in Germany … )
Here we were in Berlin. Just a half block away was the historic Checkpoint Charlie. We saw this on our huge day of Berlin walking and when we saw the famous Brandenburg Gate up close.
8
Jul 15
Daydreaming of Belgium
(Still more extra stuff from Brussels.)
There we were, sitting outside the beautiful St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral.
People have been worshipping perhaps as far back as the ninth century. This building went up between the 13th and 16th centuries. The stained glass windows and confessionals are that old. Just think of it. That place was old when the U.S. was new.
Don’t worry. We went inside. I produced a little video. You can see it here.
6
Jul 15
Two things about dining in Berlin
(This is extra material from our trip to Germany because it is summertime and our trip was grand.)
The food was very inexpensive. That’s the first thing. We went to a few places where the bottled water — which you do pay for — costed as much as the food. The grocery store was pretty cheap too.
The second thing we learned while eating at A Magica, a pizza place, on the suggestion of a friend. Germans eat their pizza with fork and knives. All of them. Sometimes you have to use a fork. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. No shame in it. To see an entire restaurant doing it was a bit unnerving.
Nearby the pizza parlor was Gethsemane Church, built in 1893:
The architect here used both Romanesque Revivalism with round arch windows and neo-Brick Gothic with traceries and rib vaults in the construction. His work wasn’t damaged during World War II, and there is a plate commemorating the German resistance against the Nazi government. Like many churches, this one was a meeting place for East Germans opposed to that government. The statue in the foreground is the Benedictive Christ, previously stood at the former Church of Reconciliation. That church was destroyed by the East German government in 1985 to make more space for the Berlin Wall. Since reunification it has been a central locale of civil rights groups and peace movements.
Just down the street was a cool sign for a burger joint:
I wonder how they eat those.
