Maminka

Well by now my mom should be in Stockholm waiting for her flight back to Chicago. My mom got to come visit me for ten days and we were in Uhersky Brod, Prague and Berlin. Due to the volcanic ash cloud over Iceland my mom was twelve hours late so we missed out on spending a day in Vienna. She arrived in Vienna at ten p.m. and we got back to Uhersky Brod around midnight so it was straight to bed. The next day I showed my mom all around the town and on Friday I took her to see school and then we went to Buchlov Castle and Chateau and grilled out for dinner. On Saturday we drove to Prague and my host family showed us all around. We went to Prague Castle, Charle's Bridge, OldTown Square and then we just wandered around a bit. On Sunday we had a really good American breakfast of pancakes, bacon, sausage, syrup and orange juice. At two thirty we took the train to Berlin and arrived around seven forty five. There, we met up with a nice family that we stayed with for three days. Their daughter is on exchange in Brookfield and goes to BEHS and our church. My mom knows her host family and offered to take her winter clothes home to Berlin and we got to stay with her family. They were extremely nice. They showed us all around Berlin. On Monday we went to a museum called The Story of Berlin which a comprehensive history of the city. It was extremely well done and the section about when the Berlin Wall was in the city was ridiculous. It's extremely hard to imagine the city when it was divided because, obviously, it no longer is, so when you go there it's hard to get a feel for what it must have been like to live there back then. After that we went back to the house because it started to rain. Later we went out with Claudia, the woman we were staying with, and we went to Potsdamer Platz to see the last remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall that are still standing where they were when they were first built. Potsdamer Platz is now a huge Sony Center with nice shops and a movie theater, but it used to be the wasteland between East and West Berlin. On Tuesday we went to a church that was destroyed to make way for the Berlin Wall and then reconstructed once The Wall fell. It was only partly reconstructed, but still very interesting. Later we went to the German Parliament building. It's an extremely unique piece of architecture. On the top of the building is a large glass dome that has two spiral staircases going up and large pyramidal mirror pointing down towards the bottom of the dome. As you walk up one of the staircases you can see the city and an audio tour explains what is what and its history. The dome is directly above the Parliament chamber where parliament meets so you can see where they sit because there's a large hole in the floor of the dome with glass over it. I really enjoyed it. On Wednesday we took the train back to Uhersky Brod from Berlin and that took the whole day. Then on Thursday we went to Olomouc which is the city where my current host mother went to university. She showed us around and we saw where she studied and a couple churches. Then for dinner we went over to the Hornaks', my first host family, house and my second host family was there as well as the president of Rotary club Uhersky Brod. We had a traditional Czech meal and then stayed and talked for a while. On Friday we went to the Komensky Museum. Jan Amos Komensky was a revolutionary educator when he lived and he wanted to make learning more like a game. He traveled Europe reforming the education system in many countries. Uhersky Brod is one of his three possible birthplaces. After that we went to meet the mayor and then went for lunch with a couple other Rotarians. It was another traditional Czech meal of duck and potatoes. After that we had some time to relax and mom packed. Then for dinner we went with one Rotarian and had a really good dinner. Finally we came back and mom made sure she had everything all ready to go for the morning. We all got up at two a.m. to take her to the airport and we got there around five for her seven o'clock flight to Stockholm. I slept on the way back and now I have to go because I leave for Greece tomorrow and haven't started packing yet. I'll be sure to post again once I get back and I had a really fun time with my mom.