writing in this blog has been difficult as the keyboard keeps going down,

Yesterday we went inblazing sunshine a five hour river boat ride, thenoff ti the Opera got there linitially

by bus Nd thenunderground, once there we changed our voucher for tickets and found  the BAR where we ordered smoked salmonand cheese with red wine and whitenwine formthe ontermission,

The Opera was wonderful singing. but the settings were very very modern.  I remember seeing Richard the third portrayed as Chicago G angsters....But this was not quite so extreme and on the whole worked.   At the intermission we met a chRming woman born in Berlin but nhaving worked for 8 years in Brussels...

Them we went tomtwo jazz bars, settling downto Quasimoto where there was a great trumpet .

the 4 piece were from Tokyo Prague and Spain... we thengot back to the hotel and in the jazz bar foundna womanplaying up a storm...somwe were in bed byn2

I aam writing this saturday mirning, after an enormous breKfat which usually means that we do not need lunch.  We are now planni f to visit museums as it is Raining.  Patti is a devotee of CNN so we are hearing an awful lot about D Trump, makes you frightened, especially after visitng the recent museums to recent bigots Nd the terrible results of letting people im to power who RANT.

on the canal

our sustenance

we are travelling east into the Tiersgarten with the second oldest zoo in Eorope on the right ...the zoo was on west Berlin and the tiergarden wa in the east

y

iur first full day Berlin

Patti and 8 did a workout today.   We left the Sheridan shotel  at about 0900 arriiving back here about 2000

we walked withthe tour guide named Jess, a Jewish /Student of history now at Hum bolt U working on a grad degree in history.  No doubt from his history background he covered in his first talk about nine centuries of history starting with the early beginnings whenGermany was just a disparate group through the many "duchy" states to the joining together . I think in 1813, against the Danes. when for this group under the Prussians they  dealt well together. so they might as well be together to the craziness after WWI and the Versailles agreement some of the nastiness of that agreement and the slippery way in which Hitler came to power to the cold war ,to the reunification, to the present......wow

we ended the day along  a piece of the wall  and the hall of Terror and an expose of the SS

We ended our day in the swimming pool and eating at an Italian restaurant 

frenchkneesfall201!6

We r at LHR Patti was thoroughly searched and unfortunately had an important cream in a 125 ml tube

so she had to reconstrucgt her packing and then find a smaller container ,empty it and then take it down to security so she could squeeze the contents into athe smaller conyainer

fortunately we have some time before connecting with the Berlin flight