Bad Oldesloe, Hamburg, Berlin, oh my!

So, blogger's working now, so I can posty. I left on Sunday with my host mom and my host brothers to visit their grandma, Oma Edith (see picture there, younger host brother Johannes is in there, too), who lives in Bad Oldesloe, a little town about a half hour away from Hamburg. I ate dinner with her and my host family Sunday night, then took the train to Hamburg on Monday morning. I had never been to Hamburg before, it's a very interesting city, with the harbor and all. The tenth and (how do you spell 12th?!) 12th picture down there is of the Hamburg Rathaus, or town hall, I took a tour of it, very swanky. The second picture of it is from a tower of a church that was bombed in WW2 and left as a memorial. The fourth picture is of the Hamburg harbor, from the ferry docks. I took a ferry for about a half hour to a little suburb of Hamburg, sat outside on the top deck the whole way there, was frozen by the time I got there, ate some hot french fries, and took it back. I also saw several famous churches in Hamburg, of course, steeple hunting is fun. I got back from Hamburg around 8:30, watched The Spy Who Loved Me in German with the host mom and brothers, then went to bed. I got up at 5 the next morning to catch my train to Berlin, was very excited. It was a half hour back to Hamburg, then about two hours from Hamburg to Berlin. I saw everything that I wanted to see except for KaDeWe, the biggest department store in Europe, cause I forgot to go there when I was on the Ku'damm, a big shopping street, where the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is. So, starting from the top, that's Rüdesheimer Square, the neighborhood where my family lived for six months when I was 9/10. My dad took a picture of me on that square on my tenth birthday, in warmer weather the whole square is full of beautiful flowers, and the fountain is running. Then we have a view of the Spree river and the surrounding area. Then, the Reichstag, the German Parliament building (right?), then the sign at Checkpoint Charlie, then me in front of the Brandenburger Tor, the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Cathedral, we heard St. Mathew's Passion back in the day, and once, we wanted to go to church there, but we had forgotten that the time change had happened, so we were an hour late and missed it. Then is our old apartment building, Moritz bouncing on the couch at the host grandma's, teeheehee, and the Berlin Phliharmonic, which is connected to the Musical Instrument Museum, my favorite museum in Berlin. I got in there for a half an hour, it was still free for me, yay, they don't have as many Stradivaris that they used to, only one now, and they don't have the harpsichord that most likely belonged to J.S. Bach, but several from the organ builder Silbermann, and one from C.P.E. Bach. They used to have four or five Strads, I think. Oh well, it was still great to see it again.

So, that was my beginning of the week. Now, I'm supposed to be stressing about all this music I'm supposed to be learning. Yikes.