Berlin

After our exams on the 16th, Nick, Mike, Daniel, Nathan, Julian and I headed out to the train station for Berlin. We decided to take the night train to each city to save the money on hostels, and surprisingly, the bunk I had on the train was more comfortable than the bed that I had in Utrecht.

We arrived in Berlin at 4:30 in the morning and got completely suckerpunched by the cold as we walked off the train; it was a good 5 degrees C colder than Utrecht. Better yet,the busses didn't start running till 6 so we decided to take the hour long walk to our hostel which was a really cool bar downstairs w/ cheap jager shots and then the hostel upstairs, then found out that our rooms weren't gonna be ready till 2 so we just all crashed on the couches in the lounge for a couple hours, ate the free breakfast and took off to explore the city. We took the free walking tour with a riot of a tour guide that showed us Brandenburg Gate, The Richdag, The Holocost Memorial, The Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and some other random lil blurbs about the city like the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his kid off the balcony a couple years back. The Holocost Memorial probably had the most impact on me in Berlin. It's made out of a square blocks worth of concrete pillars which get taller towards the middle while the ground gets lower. When you're in the center of it, u get this really claustrophobic and lost feeling, which of course is the point of the memorial. Because of its construction, a lot of the ice that covers the ground inside the memorial doesn't melt, so we ended up slipping and sliding around the whole thing too. The Richdag (the parliament building) also had a lot of meaning in the design. There's a glass dome on top which people can walk around on which is directly above the parlaiment room, and it was constructed this way so that whenever parliament members needed a reminder of who they worked for, all they had to do was look up.

The architectural layout of the city was absolutely gorgeous. I wondered for a while why buildings aren't built in this classical style anymore until i realized that gold inlays and michaelangelo status statues all over the place aren't the most cost efficient way to build. And despite the fact that most of the city was destroyed in the 20th century, most of the buildings were rebuilt extremely similarly to their original looks. I really wish I paid attention in AP Art History so I could better describe everything.

That night on our way to a pub crawl we discovered the greatest food known to man, the kebab. Its this turkish pita type thing filled w/ veggies, meat and spices, and only cost around 2 Euro. We pretty much lived off these things for the rest of the trip. While we were buying the tickets for the crawl some guy tapped me on my shoulder, turns out it was my friend from freshman year's ex-boyfriend who i hadn't seen in 2 years. Small world huh? The actual pub crawl was a lot of fun but really sketch. We started off at this place called Zepatas where they led us into a creepy back room, then led us out the back and started pouring premixed screwdrivers down our throats. Between pubs we would stop under random overpasses and do the same and randomly got into an argument with some British guys about how David Beckham is garbage. We ended up at this really eurotrash club (like girls dancing in cages Eurotrash) called Matrix which looked like it was carved out of a sketchy mountain. Apparantly there was a room in the back where people were breathing fire but i never made it back. Me and Nathan headed out back to the hostel but realized we had no idea how to get back on public transit so we ended up walking an hour and a half on completely iced over sidewalks back to our hostel doing charlie brown falls the whole way back. Pairing this walk with my vans slip ons that provide no support what so ever destroyed my feet and put me in a good deal of pain for the rest of the trip.

The next day we took another tour through the same company of the 3rd Reich which we actually had to pay for, which was kind of a waste of time. Our guide essentially took us through all the same stuff that we saw the day before but with a different lecture that went along with them. On the way back we stopped at this one deserted island themed restaurant and had a long interesting conversation with the waitress about her going into psychosis by age 16. That night we just stayed at the hostel bar to watch the playoff games coz we were so exhausted. The third and last day in Berlin we just took time to walk around and window shop. Bubbles gave me the idea to collect a flag from each country that I visit while i'm here which as expensive as its gonna be to do, is gonna look sick when I put em up when i get back to Berkeley.

When we got to the train station that night we found out that the person we booked our tickets for the train from messed up and we only had 3 tickets between me, Daniel, Julian and Nathan and the ticket office couldn't sell us another ticket. Weighing out our options between sneaking one guy on the train, or leaving a man behind, we decided that we didn't want to go to German/Polish jail so one of us was going to have to stay behind and catch the next train out. Because me and dan had the tickets on our cards, it was between Nathan and Bubbles. We flipped a coin and Nathan ended up getting assed out. Luckily, the train conductor was able to sell us an extra ticket. So 60 bucks and a near heart attack later, we were on our way to Krakow, Poland.