Welcome to Berlin, and please stop jumping on the Holocaust Memorial

THE SENNEFF SIEBEN INVADE BERLIN.

Who says a big family can't travel?  We're figuring this thing out!  This week we rented a three-day stay in an apartment in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin and took our 5 kids out to tour the city.  Since we've already earned our "large European city tour with 5 kids" badge in Paris, just to make it more exciting we threw in a couple of grandparents to make it 9 people in total.

Our lesson learned this time: As long as you keep your head down and keep moving, you can successfully take in one of the busiest tourist destinations in all of Europe.  Here, for example, was our rough itinerary for day 1:

• 9:00AM:  Showed up at the subway and bought our passes, waited for the U to Alexanderplatz. (Subway station in our neighborhood is "Senefelderplatz", seems appropriate").
• 9:11 AM:  Arrived at the Fernsehturm, the TV Tower of Berlin and got an eagle-eye view of the city from the observation deck.
• 9:25 AM:  First "the kids are so embarrassing" comment heard from Melissa.
• 10:51 AM:  Photo op at Checkpoint Charlie.
• 11:20 AM:  Stroller breaks down.  Emergency lunch stop while I try to patch it together.
• 11:42 AM:  Arrived at the Berlin wall.  Toured the museum/memorial Topographie des Terrors  on the site of the Gestapo Headquarters.
• 12:34 PM:  Arrived at Potsdamer Platz, the "Times Square" of Berlin.  Found there is not much for 5 hyped up kids to do at Potsdamer Platz, moved on.
• 1:03 PM:  Short stop at Starbucks so Melissa could have her first Chai Tea Latte since summer 2010.
• 1:28  PM:  Arrived Jewish Holocaust Memorial, a group of randomly sized blocks occupying a city block in Berlin.
• 1:29 PM:  Kids asked by security not to "jump on the memorial."  Herd moves on.
• 1:38 PM:  Brandenburg Gate, probably the most recognizable icon of Berlin.
• 1:41 PM:  Lose Anna in the crowd at Brandenburg Gate, group is down to 8.
• 1:47 PM:  Find Anna, back to full strength.
• 2:11 PM:  Arrive at Reichstag, the seat of the German Bundestag.
• 2:51 PM:  Duck-duck-goose with Grandma in the Tiergarten.
• 3:30 PM:  Stroller breaks for good (or so we thought).  Back to the apartment for a short breather and mass feeding frenzy.
• 5:31 PM:  Evening stroll in Volkspark Friedrichsain, the oldest municipal park in Berlin.
• 8:00 PM: Lights out for the swarm.

And that was just day 1!  Day 2 included a cornicopia of public transportation (Cable Car, S-Bahn, U-Bahn, and Water Taxi), a walk down Unter den Linden (the Champs Elysees of Berlin), a stop at the Lustgarten, a walk back down Unter den Linden, a walk away from Unter den Linden and then back to Unter den Linden again, then back down the other direction on Unter den Linden, until turning around and heading back up Unter den Linden for a last time (The ladies referred to this  as "shopping") ...before finally retiring for dinner in a Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood restaurant.

Berlin, like Paris, is an excellent place to see a lot of history in a short amount of time, and it's hard for five kids to do much damage to places like the Brandenberg Gate (it survived two World Wars, after all).  It was also a place for some great photo opportunities that the kids will appreciate when they are older (one would hope).