Day 27: Disappointment

Yum! Frosties!

The kids have been asking to go to Legoland, ever since we found out there was one in Berlin. So, I bought tickets online (saved a lot of money ordering in advance) and printed them at Chris' work after walking with him in the morning (duh, we have no printer at home!)

I only walked home part way. I took the tram back up the hill. It was awesome! I had to save my walking energy for Legoland. The only bummer is that I took a short cut that put me past the stop I was looking for. So my short cut had me walking farther than planned. Ooops.  No worries, I still didn't have to walk up the hill!

After lunch/snacks, the kids and I headed out to Legoland. Side note: I found the website for the Legoland very difficult to navigate. It seemed to have lots of information, just not the info I was looking for. For example, I knew it was underground (inside) but found that hard to prove. I couldn't find too many photos (on Google Images) to see other people's experiences. I did find that this is not a Legoland, but a Legoland Discovery Centre, which is not affiliated with Legos, directly (so coupons and cards, etc. from the "real" Lego won't be applicable here).

So, we get there.

The entrance going down (left), with R2D2 (middle)
Venice, taller than Harry Potter, even though she's on the ground and he's on a platform (right)

The Wall going down.

And it was pretty lame. It really seemed it was for kids 7 and under. There were tons and tons of LEGOs to play with. So that was awesome. But, there were also many small areas for kids to play, some with a "5 and under" sign on it, so Venice and Xander were too old.

There were only two levels. On the first sub-level (-1), was MiniLand. Pretty cool. Basically Berlin done in LEGOs (but still not as cool as the mini cities in San Diego's Legoland). All the landmarks from Berlin were built and on display. There was even a "below ground" section with an U-Bahn going around. There were other moving trains as well and interactive buttons that made parts of the display move. My favourite was the Wall near the Brandenburger Tor (see photo). When you pushed the button near here, a part of the Wall went down and a freedom song played.

That's about it for this level. Then onto the next sub-level (-2) and this is where there are tons of LEGOs to build with. We went straight to the area where you could build a car and race it down two different tracks (one did a loop-de-loop and the other jumped the gap through the loop-de-loop. There were all sorts of different sized wheels, but the kids found out that the bigger wheels did not work at all. Only the littlest wheels would have the car go smoothly down the tracks. This took about an hour of our time.  We got very good at counting down, "drei, zwei, eins, BEEP!" as you hear this every time someone pushed the start button... which was about once a minute, at least.

Xander building (left). Venice thinks her's been in a crash (middle). The "Jump the Gap" track.

Another favourite part, for the kids, was the laser game. Three levels (third level had a roaming laser) of lasers to jump and weave under to get to the other side's "treasure" button. You raced for time and accuracy. They did this so much their knees got scuffed.

Xander (left) and Venice (right)

We went to look for the Dragon Ride. Look at the photo (see photo). Doesn't it look fun? Can't you almost see the wind in their hair? I should have read more carefully as the website describes it as a "friendly dragon". I think it went, maybe, half a mile per hour. It was more like It's a Small World with LEGOs. We were hoping for speed but instead we got a dark, sad, low budget ride.

So, that's it! That's all that's at this Discovery Centre. We tried to spend as much time as we could, but after a while, it was time to go, go, go with our sad faces, we left, left, left.

Onto better things. How about a new park? Nope, it's sprinkling rain. How about Bubble Tea (gag)? Yes!

Venice had spotted a Bubble Tea café the other day, so we went there to try it out. There were only tea flavour (no fruity flavours, so Xander didn't end up liking his... don't feel too bad for him. We took the nasty little tapioca balls home, he rinsed them off, and drank them with orange soda for the save).

Venice's drink. Milk Tea with tapioca balls and noodles.

While we were enjoying our drinks (some of us, Venice loved hers and I liked my Peaches in Oolong Tea) a woman, sitting next to us, asked me, "What are these?" She's pointing to the tapioca balls (or tapioca pearls as the café calls them). I say, "tapioca". She asks, hesitantly, "Is it fish?" No. "Did it ever crawl?" No. "What is it?" I ask her what her language is (it's obviously not English by her accent), she says Hebrew. I tried to Google translate to work, but I don't think it did. She still didn't know what it was. She said she thought it was strawberries (at the time it was weird, but now, I think she must have mean blueberries as they do look like blueberries). Anyway, I say, it's a flour. "Flower?" No... hmmm. It's a starch. She's really looking confused now and she pauses... then looks at Venice and Xander and asks, "The kids like them?" (she is VERY incredulous and almost exasperated when she asks this) Yes. They do. I don't. She nods at this. And that's the end of that. She proceeded to drink her tea, but I noticed when she threw her cup away, it had almost all of the tapioca balls left.

This. Was. Good.

After such a lame day out, we (or I) did NOT want to cook. So we texted Chris and he said to meet him at Tommi's restaurant. We were going to take the tram, but it didn't come for 6 minutes and it was only a 9 minute walk (of course, as we were walking, it went right by us, darn it). Short story, this was a VERY tasty meal with a VERY tasty hamburger. Everyone enjoyed their meal immensely (it helped that we shared a very good milkshake too). A great way to make up for the day. A fulfilling meal with family.

Really, the end of the day for the kids. Chris and I stayed up until past 1am planning some trips outside of Berlin as well as buying me a dirndl for Oktoberfest.

Stay tuned!