Hello from Berlin!

The Grand Duchess asked if we could drop by an internet cafe after dinner this evening, so here I am, making an unexpected entry to the GD of S blog. Almost two weeks into my visit, and things have been great. We got back from our anniversary trip over to Bremen and Lübeck earlier today. Neat to revisit both areas, but things have really changed in the 20 plus years since I was last in these two smaller cities. Among other sites of interest here in the Berlin area, we have also visited the old Spandau citadel on the outskirts of Berlin early on as well as Sans Soucci Palace and the extensive gounds around it in Potsdam, both of which were fascinating.

On the figure front, The Holger Eriksson cavalry, mentioned in a previous post, are lovely, and the Garrison Prussian artillery crew were waiting on our kitchen table thanks to our landlady, Frau Grossmann, who picked them up at the past office while we were away last week. Equally wonderful miniatures there. I will take and upload a few photographs in early July once I'm home again. Next weekend, we are off to Usedom on the Baltic coast, to visit the experimental rocket site, where Werner von Braun developed much of the know-how that was later used in the space race of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Best of all, my German is improving by leaps and bounds. The Grand Duchess and her friends here in Berlin have been instrumental in this regard. I'm nowhere near fluent of course, but lots of new vocabulary every day, and the German way of constructing sentences has finally started to make sense. Plus, I find myself understanding quite a bit on TV, radio, and in conversation, even if it is still a bit difficult to say something appropriate! All great fun really, and something that will help to make this trip particularly memorable.