Public Transportation

THE OTHER DAY I was sitting on the commuter train minding my own business when a 20-something male plopped down on a chair directly across from me.  He placed his bookbag on the seat next to him.  He unzipped it and pulled out two giant plastic rubber gloves, like the kind you might see a cleaning lady wear. He carefully stretched them over both hands...and then, extremely slowly and deliberately, he used his right gloved hand to gently lift open the trash receptacle below the window next to our seat.  His approach was so cautious that it was almost as if he expected a horrifying creature to jump out at him.  He lifted the lid only a centimeter or so - wincing sideways as he did, and then suddenly, as if satisfied it did not contain said creature, flipped it close, took of his gloves, and then promptly got comfortable and went to sleep. 

Public transportation has its idiosyncrasies.  That's actually a part of the commuter train experience I look forward to - the Train Culture.  And as I look back, it seems like our children have had plenty of opportunities to experience that too.  I was looking through our photos not too long ago and was surprised to see how much we've experienced.  

Waiting for a regional train in France. 

A day's worth of subway tickets in Paris. 

Camden checks out the sign and the board (not pictured) at an U-bahn (Subway) stop in Berlin. 

A Subway zooms buy....I am honestly not entirely sure where, I think also Berlin. 

Waiting for an Italian regional train to take us to Ostia Antica in southern Italy. 

First in line for a Vaparetto - a Venician water taxi - in a late evening tour of Venice.  

A glass-covered Water Taxi in Berlin on the Spree river.  It was so hot inside of that glass Tylenol pill....

Zooming along the causeway from Padua to Venice on an Italian regional train.  

The expansive Nation subway station in Paris.  

City XPress, and ironic name for a gondola ride to the top of a mountain in Austria. 

A toy explodes in a powdery white mess on an otherwise pristine Roman subway.  

On a Deutsche Bahn short hop train to Deidesheim for the Christmas Market. 

Funicular!  Don't remember where, but it is fun to say Funicular! 

Horse and Carriage in the birthplace of Mozart - Salzburg

Frankfurt Flughafen, watching the 767 load up and waiting to board.  

Taking the ferry across the IJ in Amsterdam. 

Waiting for the metro in Amsterdam's Central Station. 

Riding a cog train to the Mer de Glace in France

A large nearly vertical gondola in Chamonix, France

On the Ferry across the channel

The famous red double-decker busses of London (see the telephone booth?)

On "The Tube" in London, arguably the worlds most well known subway. 

Aboard the Renfe Spanish regional train

On the Barcelona metro. 

This is really just a sampling of the times when I had my camera handy.  It doesn't include the French TGV, or the Deutsche Bahn ICE trains, or the gritty public buses in Rome, or the time we were jammed into a French regional train and Jazzy screamed for mommy (who was crammed into a distant corner) for 20 minutes straight, or the time a bus broke down in Rome and we got kicked off and stranded, or the time I had to have Melissa and the kids come pick me up at a small town train station an hour away from our house because the track was suddenly and mysteriously closed.

Public transportation has its idiosyncrasies.

How Grandpa McGuyver Saved Berlin

I WAS A LITTLE SUSPICIOUS WHEN my dad returned from the 'hardware store' with a tree branch and a bag of Berliners.



It all started one day earlier when we had a catastrophic stroller breakdown in downtown Berlin.  Early in the day during our first day in Berlin -  somewhere between the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie - we realized our baby stroller was on borrowed time.  A brace that snaps into place to keep the stroller from folding up into storage mode was bending badly and at the verge of breaking, making the stroller unusable.  Mid morning we stopped to empty out the stroller and bend the brace into shape in order to get it to hold out for the rest of the day, but on the way home while dragging it down some subway stairs it finally and irreversibly broke in two.  The stroller was doomed.  And so was our vacation.

PERHAPS YOU THINK I'm being dramatic.  The issue is, with a family of seven, a stroller is never just a stroller, especially on long day trips.  It's really more like a Conestoga Wagon on the Oregon Trail.  We load that think to the hilt with all of the necessities of surviving an 8-10 hour outing.  When I emptied the stroller in order to repair it, not only did I have to unload the 3 year old,  but I took out 14 sandwich halves, 2 cans of Pringles, 4 Diet Cokes, 5 bottles of water, a carton of juice boxes, some dried fruit, assorted nuts (dry roasted peanuts and cashews) a package of wet wipes, 2 diapers, 2 coats, a wallet,  a pair of sunglasses, a camera, and Al Capone's getaway car.  And only that last one was made up.  (Mental note, this might be highly correlated to why it broke in the first place, but I digress.)

Fortunately for us, when it finally did break it was late in the day, so we managed to slug it back to the apartment without too many losses.  But the prospects of another full day in downtown Berlin without a way to strap down our precocious 3-year-old and without our necessities-carrier, day 2 was looking bleak.

Enter grandpa.

Early the next morning he set out in the neighborhood on a mission to find a hardware store.  I hadn't seen one earlier and assumed (correctly) that he would't find one either, but he didn't let a little thing like that get in the way.  He came back from his foraging not with a spare part or piece of PVC or copper tubing, nay, but with a tree branch about 2 inches thick, and also a sack of Berliner donuts.  The idea for the stick - says he, while eating a Berliner - was to cut the stick to length, jam it into the appropriate place in the stroller frame, secure it in to place, and stroll gloriously through the rest of the day.

I'LL BE HONEST.  I didn't see that coming together quite the way he did.  Not that I didn't appreciate the effort, but the only thing worse than walking our family of seven around downtown Berlin without a stroller would be walking our family of seven around downtown Berlin with a broken stroller slung over my shoulder.  So if it didn't work, we had a lot to lose.  Secondly, I didn't see how we would ever get the stick cut to length cleanly (answer: with persistent sawing motion of a kitchen knife) or secure it firmly to the frame (answer: with a roll of masking tape and packing tape).  Sound crazy?

Behold, for posterity's sake,  the finished product:



I will just cut to the chase and admit I was wrong, because despite how it looks, it lasted the entire day with no trouble.  We dragged this thing all over Berlin.  Up and down and down and up Unter den Linden.  Up flights of stairs and down flights of stairs.  On subways and on tram cars.  Sometimes it held the baby, and sometimes it held the 6-year-olds.  And always it held 40 extra pounds of pack-gear.  And by some miracle and a lot of tape it didn't give an inch.

So here's to Grandpa, the who would have done just fine on the Oregon Trail.  Minus the Berliners.

The People You Meet at Brandenburg Gate

Kid: "Dad, why are the soldiers at Brandenburg Gate?"

Me: "Well, there used to be soldiers here who stood gaurd.  Now they are here so you can take your picture with them."



Kid: "Dad, what is the big ugly guy painted white doing at Brandenburg Gate?"

Dad: "That's a mime. They are all over in Europe."



Kid: "Dad, why are there horses and Brandenburg gate?"

Me: "Um, I guess so you can take a ride on a carriage through the city."



Kid: "Dad, why is there an American Indian at Brandenberg Gate?"

Dad: "Huh? Uh, I'm not really sure. Maybe because a lot of people in Europe really like the old west."



Kid: "Dad, why is there a tiger at Brandenburg Gate?"

Dad: "That's not a tiger up there, those are hors....oh, yeah, that.  I'm not really sure. I guess so you can get your picture taken with one."



Kid: "Dad, why is the San Diego chicken at Brandenburg Gate?."

Dad: "Thats not the San Diego Chicken."

Kid: "Yeah OK,  but why is there a big yellow bird here?"

Dad: "I really don't know."



Wife:" Can you ask the man in the gorilla suit to stop scaring the children? "

Dad: "Of Course honey."

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).