My New Year's day clients Dawn and Lisa on our day together. They were absolutely vivacious and irrepressably fun. We hardly noticed how cold the day was.
The swans are sailing on the Spree River in front of the Marie-Elizabeth-Lüders Haus. A curious sidenote: the Spree really never floods because Berlin is virtually a swamp. The ground is saturated to a high level, and the soil is sand. These two features allow the river to never flood, the excess water soaks into the sand and fills the huge underground aquafier. This is how we can build our buildings so close to the river without fear of flooding. The river flows virtually constant throughout the year.
The girls also forwarded me the pic of the babylonian "Gates of Ishtar" in the Pergamon Museum. The tiles are still vivid and intense blue, 4000 years later!
