Monday, April 27, 2009

tegeler seefront property! and stuff.

this is what i want for my birthdae.
well, mostly just the orange one.
actually, i really don't want that at all, but i do think it is funny and also awesome. well, maybe i do want it. anyway:
things are going really well. i had brunch with my coworkers today. the weather was fantastic! we were supposed to meet at 11; however, i forgot that the trains run slow on sundays, and i realised i was going to be about 30 minutes late. i had left the cellphone with phil, because he was meeting someone that afternoon, so i couldn't call- i was worried that they'd think i wasn't coming. when i got there, i realised i wasn't even the last person- we still had to wait for two more people! i felt much better. it was a mexican restuarant, but other than cheese quesadillas, scrambled eggs and some kind of potato-vegetable type thing, it was mostly european breakfast food. still, it was awesome. after we ate, we sat outside for awhile in the very beautiful sunshine!
i'm still really enjoying my job: it's great. at first i was a little worried that it would be too much like babysitting, but it's actually very rewarding. the method that we use encourages the kids to be self-sufficient as much as possible, and it's surprising how much a two-year-old can accomplish if they're allowed to try to do things themselves. and it's really nice to have a job that i'm actually excited about every morning. my coworkers are all really wonderful, too, which makes it even better.
yesterday we went for a walk around tegel (our neighborhood) and realised that it's actually a very pretty and quaint area. there are a lot of beautiful churches, and some really pretty old buildings. we found some nice parks, a playground with a really cool spinny-climby tower (phil was too big) (german playgrounds are way cooler than american ones! the one in solingen by sarah's house has a wheel that you can stand/walk/run in, kind of like this. i tried to brace my hands and feet and spin all the way around in it but i fell out when i went upside down), and we went down to the Tegler See, which is a really big lake & suprisingly close to our apartment. it's about 1.2 kilometers, or 15 minutes walk, according to google maps. i'm getting more and more excited about tegel. it is still really far out from the city, and i would like a balcony and wood floors, but i do like our neighborhood a lot more now then i thought i was going to at first.
about five minutes walk from our house is the borsigturm, which i may have already written about. it's a shopping mall with clothing stores and restaurants and ice cream and a branch of our bank (berliner sparkasse). another five or ten minutes walk along the same street and you are in old tegel. most of the neighborhoods of berlin used to be individual cities, and tegel is one of them. the old tegel downtown is a little like a small town, with local stores, shops, and the alt-tegel u-bahn station (it's only one stop from our station, borsigwerke). there's a few art stores, which i like, and i found a copy shop that will scan things for me and a secret asian store run by a lady from vietnam down a back street a few days ago. i bought jasmine tea and dried mushrooms. they have fresh tofu, which is exciting, and really pretty chopsticks.
well, i have to go to bed: i have to get up kind of early to take the train to work. it takes me about 45 minutes to get there on weekdays, and it is never good to be sleepy when you have so many littlekids to play with.
xoxo!

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