July 12: Peacock Island

Tuesday saw us again following my overly ambitious lead, this time to a rather laborious trip to Pfaueninsel ("Peacock island"). Anything with that charming a name should, I suppose, be something of a challenge to reach by public transportation, and after taking the U-bahn (including a Scheinenersatzverkehrbus), and S-Bahn, we managed to get on the wrong bus going the wrong direction, resulting in an hour or so addition to our trip. I had cleverly & typically 'planned' the trip by figuring out the first few legs and assuming that the last one would be easy. I assumed both that "Chausee" meant something more specific than "avenue" or the like (via French: but who would suspsect the Germans to use French?), so we took Blah-blahblah Chausee in the wrong direction instead of the right Chausee in the right direction in the wrong direction.

The island itself is rather charming, and does indeed house peacocks, but we probably enjoyed ourselves most at the café just off the island, waiting for the (right) return bus. After assuring Arlette that we had in fact managed to pick the right mode of transportation in the right direction at least 75% of the time, we then managed a slight screw-up on the way back, and were lucky to stay awake (Janet cooking) through dinner.

So we have had some adventures, in mastering, or at least coming to terms with German bureaucracy, German electronics (cell-phone and regular phone are now more or less on line, though we are rather anxious about our ability to get the wireless hookup to function next week), and public-transport. All (or at least the last, the only one I'm fully able to understand as of yet) work quite well: but nothing is easy.