Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com

To catch up with my sister Clare and her Guntraum on their home turf, we dropped south from Denmark via the beautiful historic Hansa trade town of Lubeck (best pic of the trip yet? The city, not me eating marzipan);

It was nice to be back in Berlin, particularly for Helen who lived here there for 5 years. It is a very easy city with quite a lot happening. There is a real sense of the spare economic capacity though, with low prices, many people working part tim or on a volunteer basis. We has no agenda other than spending time with the family, though I finally managed to get several really decent cycle rides in and we picked up some particularly good leather shoes and some new noise reduction headsets for flying.

C & G were in excellent form with an impressively well sorted life in their new apartment. We checked out the local Bauhaus and IKEA as part of the ongoing apartment sorting, cooked up a few things and watched a couple of bad girl-films on their mega "beamer" (projector) which was awesome. There are two new small kittens at their place, causing amusement and frustration in roughly equal amounts. Helen busted them stealing cat food direct from the box and their favorite passtime seemed to be learning how to open doors and climbing up to investigate food.

Helen and I went for a flight over Berlin with Anatol and EEEE who are business associates of H'd friend who runs a wine store. We wanted to view the 1936 Olympic stadium and the Albert Spier designed central city airport, Templehof.

We took one full day to carefully look at everything on display at the Bauhaus archive, housed in a building designed by Walter Gropius. If anything, it made me even more aware of how fragile and fleeting any framework for productive progress is.