Church Pancake Party – 21 February 2012
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Being Shrove Tuesday, St Luke’s held its first pancake party for years, as dozens of people arrived at the Community Hall for an hour of fun. There was no charge – not even a pot for donations – as we wanted to attract as many people as possible. A number of children came from the church primary school, and I spotted my friend Geoff passing on his way home from an after-school class, so invited him to pop in too.
Inside, a fresh pancake was leaving the kitchen every minute, ready for each ‘customer’ to fill with sugar, syrup, or lemon juice, and then eat at the tables. In addition to that, there was a crafts table set up, and pancake-tossing races from one end of the hall to the other to entertain the younger ones.
All it really lacked was a party atmosphere: perhaps a little music would have livened it up a bit. Nevertheless, all had an enjoyable afternoon, as we across the road prepared to begin the period of Lent.
Video
FPSS Berlin Trip: Day Four – 16 February 2012
After waking for the last time in Germany’s capital city, we all washed and dressed, and then proceeded to unpack everything we’d packed last night in a bid to save time this morning, and repack our cases with all of that plus the things like pyjamas and wash-bags that we’d been unable to pack beforehand. We left our cases in our rooms while we ate breakfast downstairs, and then returned upstairs awaiting our rooms to be OK-ed for tidiness by the teachers. I was in one of the last dormitories to be checked, but I managed to get to the ground floor before most of my colleagues by taking the stairs as opposed to the lift. "You’re mad" they (rather oddly) told me, to which my reply was: "Six flights of stairs? Pftt. I ran up them with my case on Day One – why shouldn’t I run back down them now?"
Surprisingly, the "free luggage room", as boasted by the hostel’s website, where we would leave our valuables and luggage during the day, turned out to be the disabled loo. As we piled up cases around the sink, toilet, and hand-dryer, Mr Shire and I both had a horrible vision of a disabled person needing to use the room, and opening the door to reveal all our bags.
Travelling by train again, at 10:30am we arrived at Bernauer Straße, the location of one of the longest preserved sections of the Berlin Wall. One enters the memorial park (created on the former East Berlin side in 1999) through a missing section of the wall, where one’s greeted by an outdoor display of the faces of those who died trying to escape from East to West. Because the wall effectively went up overnight in August 1961, residents of the street who had, until that point, been able to pretty freely cross from one side to the other, were trapped on the East German side and unable to meet neighbours over-the-road. Like fifty other households, Ida Siekmann decided to jump out of her flat’s window, but she did so just before the West Berlin Fire Department had time to open the jumping-sheet, therefore becoming the first casualty of the Berlin Wall. Soon, the windows of all of the houses were (like the doorways) walled-up and occupants forced to leave, as the houses were demolished to make way for extra fortification to the wall.
FPSS Berlin Trip: Day Three – 15 February 2012
The day began with somewhat of a rush, and despite setting my alarm with plenty of time to get washed and dressed, the ‘Snooze’ button was just too tempting. As a result, we had just half an hour for the four of us to get through the shower and to put on some threads, before breakfast at 7:30am.
The reason behind the push for time was because we would be spending a few hours at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, 75 minutes away by coach. Though I’d brought my iPod dock along with me, in the event I didn’t actually get it out, partly because the majority of the rest of the group were using the time to have another forty winks, but mainly because I thought it inappropriate for us all to arrive merry and bubbly after a coach singalong to One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful.
