Last day in Berlin

This morning I get to do some sightseeing; my plans are to do the museum at Checkpoint Charlie and then a boat tour around the city, and then it'll be time to head to the naeroport.

The rest of the workshop was better; I did some hanging out with people, and everyone was very nice and helpful. SB (now at Tübingen) is a new friend, and AvS was extremely complimentary, though he did exhort me to be more formal, as well he might! Well, I will be.

I guess I forgot to blog about Saturday night, when I went to see U and Kz and their kids. I hadn't seen them since their youngest (L) started talking, and so it was neat to meet her. She showed me her store which was her birthday present, a very cool wooden structure where she has a cash register and lots of little boxes of pretend food, and fake euros in large denominations; box of biscuits for 200 euros, anyone? Later she also kept wanting me to hand her pieces to put in a puzzle she liked. The first time I spoke Japanese to her she just stared. :)

K, at age 7, was doing exactly the same kind of very silly weird talking, moving his mouth in strange ways, as my 7-year-old cousin M does. (Guess it's innate!;) Only of course he does it in three languages: Japanese, German, and English. It drives his mom crazy in whatever language he does it in, though.

I also spent a while looking at the backs of my euro coins with them. I guess I knew that the different countries had different designs, but I had forgotten it. We sorted them by country, and then Kai sorted them by year. He wanted to read "1999" as "one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine," which had me puzzled until I realized he probably hasn't done much talking about years before 2000 in English. He is going to an Engliish/German bilingual school, reading and writing in English, with German reading and writing to be added later. L will start there soon as well.

Anyway, excellent fun. And neat to see so much of U and Kz too.