A couple weeks ago we decided to quit the negative-fifteen-degree frigidity of Berlin for sunny, significantly warmer Barcelona! Barcelona is in the northeast of Spain – an area known as Catalunya (Catalonia) – and the Catalunyans have a fierce pride for their region (the title of this post is a popular refrain throughout Catalunya).
We took a walking tour through the old (read: really old) city and Jewish Quarter, and visited the Barcelona History Museum, the highlight of which is an extensive Roman ruin excavation well below street-level, including textile dyeing rooms, public baths, a wine factory, and a fishery. A second walking tour took us through the Barcelona of Gaudí: Palau Güell, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, the Sagrada Familia (the gigantic cathedral that Gaudí started in 1883 when he was 31, and won’t be complete for at least another 25 years), and sprawling, terraced Park Güell. We took a day to visit Montserrat, a multi-peaked mountain an hour north of the city: home to a Benedictine monastery and hiking trails that wind around the peaks to various shrines, chapels, hermitages, and breathtaking views. On our last two days, Barcelona celebrated the feast day of Saint Eulalia, with light shows throughout the city at night, parades of Gigantes (massive, hollow costumed figures with papier maché heads), and contests for the best-executed castell, a human tower traditional to Catalan festivals. Topped off with an FC Barcelona/Valencia CF football game at a local bar and amazing tapas and wine, this was a much-needed break from dreary midwinter!

It’s kind of hard to believe that just last weekend we were wandering around the streets of Vienna, perusing Weihnachtsmarkten, sipping coffee in cafes, and meandering streets that have been trod by over 800 years of Hapsburg royalty. After flying in on Thursday morning, we followed a walking tour around the city, taking us from the Staatsoper, past Hotel Sacher (home of the famous sacher torte!) and up to St Stephen’s cathedral, through a bunch of fancy shopping streets utterly decked out in glittering Christmas lights, and right into the heart of the Hofburg palace. We spent Friday and Saturday seeing some more specific sights, including breakfast at the Naschmarkt; a fantastic Magritte exhibit at the Albertina gallery, housed in one wing of the sprawling Hofburg palace; dinner at a Heurigen (wine garden) on the outskirts of town; a tour of the Silberkammer (Silver Collection), Sisi (a.k.a Empress Elizabeth) Museum, and Kaiserappartements at the Hofburg Palace; and one of three weekly screenings of The Third Man at a tiny theater near our hotel. On Saturday night we secured standing-room tickets for Daphne at the Opera – it was kind of a boring story, but the sets were crazy and the building itself is absolutely gorgeous: a fine way to end our stay in this beautiful city!

This post is a bit delayed, but I guess I needed two weeks to recuperate before I wrote about my two weeks in Italy for work (5 days of which, thankfully, were with Meg). From November 8th to 23rd, I was working for a conference/summit on philanthropy at Villa Serbelloni in the tiny village of Bellagio, which is at the end of a peninsula sticking into Lake Como in Northern Italy. Villa Serbelloni is sprawling estate covering most of the tip of the peninsula and is owned by The Rockefeller Foundation, which was co-presenting the summit. Leave it to me to complain about spending 15 days in a beautiful lakeside Italian village and villa, but to be fair I had to spend most of my time working. Nonetheless, the area was gorgeous and I did have some opportunities to venture out with my camera and explored the town and some of the other towns on the coast of the lake. November is very quiet on Lake Como since it’s really more of a summer destination for tourists. The area actually gets quite cold (it is in the foothills of the Italian Alps), so while it was great not having to deal with mobs of people, it also meant there wasn’t a lot going on and the weather was pretty chilly.
A bunch of us working at the summit pooled our resources and hired a boat for a two-hour tour of the lake one day (and thankfully we didn’t get marooned on a sitcom). Meg joined me for the last few days, which was great. We “hiked” a gorge in the town of Bellano (while it is rather deep, it’s not very big), got to ride on an old school hydrofoil ferry and spent our last day before flying out walking around the middle of Milan, the closest big city. Milan’s cathedral is enormous and one of the biggest and most lavish we’ve seen during our travels (and we went to St. Peter’s last year!). All in all, it was an enjoyable experience (especially since I got paid to be there), but I’m very happy to be settled back in Berlin!

There hasn’t been much going on recently except work, and spending our weekends biking through the city, finding yummy spots for Sunday brunch, and generally exploring our new neighborhood. We live in an area called Kreuzberg, which means “mountain of the cross”, named for a small but very steep hill in Viktoriapark – the highest point in Berlin! – topped by a cast iron monument dedicated to the Befreiungskriege (“liberation battles”) from the Napoleonic Wars: the monument has a cross on top, hence, mountain of the cross. Viktoriapark is simply beautiful in the fall, with cascades of yellow leaves swirling through the sunlight. Between our flat and the park is a series of streets lined with shops and cafes…we pick a new place to eat every Sunday for brunch! Two weeks ago we took a leisurely Sunday afternoon bike ride along the canal just north of our flat; the week before that, we spent a chilly evening meandering along Unter Den Linden to see the annual Festival of Lights – the Brandenburger Tör, Humbolt University, Berliner Dom, and TV tower were all lit up in fantastic, changing colors – before cozying up in Comedy Club Kookaburra for a late-night Comedy Sportz show (Comedy Sportz being the improv troup of which Noah is a veteran, and Josh one of their newest members!).

Dobre den! (That’s about all the Czech I can properly pronounce! It means “hello”.) We spent last weekend in the lovely, if tourist-crowded, Prague – an easy five-hour train ride directly from Berlin. The four quarters of the old city offered just about enough to keep us occupied for four days: on Friday we meandered through the New and Old Towns to see St Wenceslas Square, the Municipal Building (gorgeous Art Nouveau architecture), the Old Town Square and the Charles Bridge. Rainy, cold Saturday saw us through the Castle and Little Quarters, where we visited the Castle and St Vitus Cathedral (all while dodging huge tour groups), and had dinner at a fantastic monastery brewery (pork steaks with goat cheese plus potatoes plus micro-brew equals YUM). The Jewish Museum – in the Jewish quarter of the Old Town, naturally – was open on Sunday; the old cemetery was astounding with generations of gravestones, jumbled and skewed and half-buried as new layers have been added. When the sun came out in the late afternoon we headed up the hill above the river to the park with the Prague Metronome to take some fantastic photos of the city and enjoy a drink in the beer garden overlooking the river. We took things a bit slow on Monday, attempting to ride the funicular up Petřín hill to the Eiffel-like Lookout Tower (sadly, the funicular was closed) before visiting the final two synagogues of the Jewish Museum and then catching a train home. Strangely, it was a relief to be back in Germany, where we can both at least pronounce the language!