The sun's back. We got a late start because we wanted to sleep in and I wanted to shower and do laundry too.

The instructions for using the washer and dryer were like a logic problem, but we figured it out. Clothes came out OK.

When we finallly made it outside, it was early afternoon. We started at the Bauhaus Archive, which means arriving an hour before it closed for the day. No Bauhaus items but a fantastic exhibit of Feininger's photography of 1940s New York.

Ten minutes before closing we were sitting in the cafe fortifying ourselves with coffee beverages. Andrew reached for the chocolate-bar accompaniment and smashed into his tall glass still full of latte. The glass crashed and the latte spewed spectacularly across the tabletop and floor. When the cafe guy came out with a rag, he said, "Oh wow ... wow, wow" and then uttered not a single sound more the entire time he was mopping up the mess. Andrew, cheated of his caffeine, ordered another one. The guys behind the counter seemed reluctant to give him another. Andrew tried to ease the situation. He said, "I've had some practice now," to which the guy who'd mopped up the spill replied, "Me too."

Afterward we hung around the Neu Nationalgalerie gawking at the awesome building designed by Mies van der Rohe. We were too late to go in, what with the latte explosion and all, but it was nice to sit in the empty plaza meditating on the structure and all the ways it interacts with its surroundings.

From there we walked through the Tiergarten and to the Reichstag. We waited in line to go up into the dome as the sun set. The view from the top was spectacular.

We closed the day with dinner in the basement of the Bertolt Brecht house. Very tasty traditional German food. I had a stew my grandma would have loved. Andrew picked the eisbein, which his dentist recommended he try. It was a whole hog hock cooked crisp and served with sauerkraut. When it came out of the kitchen the hock looked so huge it could've been a restaurant scene from the Flinstones. Andrew barely put a dent in the thing.