Berlin!!!!

Now for the next installment of the details of my week of European travel. I last left off with boarding the train to Berlin. That was definitely an interesting experience. We were put in a 6 person cabin. Our room was probably about the size of a small closet and it had 6 bunks along the walls. There was barley enough room for 1 person to stand between the bunks. I was lucky enough to be on the top bunk, which actually gave me a bit more headroom than everyone else, but I had the farthest to climb up the ladder. We were bunked with two very nice older French men. They went to sleep almost as soon as we got on the train, so mostly James and I planned out what we wanted to see in Berlin. We arrived around 8:30 in the morning on the 23rd. As with Paris, we had a little bit of a hard time trying to get transportation tickets. We eventually wound up finding something similar to our Paris metro tickets and boarded the S-ban to the stop that would take us closest to our hostel. This time we were staying at the JetPack City Hostel. It was a lot smaller than St. Christopher’s, but I liked it better because it came with free internet access. Plus, the people were really nice and it was a very clean facility. We couldn’t check in until 3:30 in the afternoon, but when we got there the owners told us about a 3.5 hour free walking tour of Berlin, which we immediately set off for. They were nice enough to let us leave our luggage in the luggage room, so we didn’t have to carry everything around with us all day. The walking tour was fantastic. It covered all of the major, popular sights of the city. We saw Bradenburger Tor, which is a fairly famous gate of the city. From there we also saw the Reichstag, which is the main government building in Berlin. In the course of our walk we also saw the Holocaust memorial, spot where Hitler’s bunker was, Checkpoint Charlie, the spot where the huge book burning rally took place just before WWII, the former Royal living quarters and Museum Island, among other things. It was basically a tour of everything I wanted to see while we were in Berlin, shoved into the first 3.5 hours we were there. At the conclusion, we headed back to our hostel to check in. Later that night we headed out to the Reichstag. They have free tours that take you up on top of the building and the massive glass dome that overlooks the house of parliament. By the time we got there, it was night. So, once again, we got a pretty amazing view of our current city, light up at night. It was pretty cool how the whole idea of the glass dome on top of the building was to remind the politicians that the people are the ones who are in charge. From there we went and found dinner at an Italian restaurant in the area.
We got up in the morning and had breakfast in the café attached to our hostel. From there we headed out to Potsdamer Platz. There we saw the film museum, Lego land and a section of the Berlin wall that is still preserved from its active days. They took huge sheets of steel and put it up between two sections of the wall and they keep it set up with barbwire and both parts of the fence, almost exactly as it was during it’s use. From there we went to Tiergarten, which is a pretty massive park in the city. There is a statue called the victory column. What’s comical about the statue on top of the column is that it is made from melted down French cannon balls and was then dipped in gold. After Tiergarten we went to Alexanderplatz. We saw the memorial to Marx and Engels, as well as Karl-Marx-Allee, which is the main street that the Russians used when they invaded Berlin during WWII. After that we went to the Atles, which is the Ancient Egypt museum in Berlin. They have the bust of Nefertiti, which is one of the most well-preserved artifacts from that time period. That day was Zoë’s 21st birthday, so we had dinner in a nicer German restaurant. She tried a raspberry flavored beer, which actually tasted pretty good. Surprisingly, it seems going back to Germany, temporarily turned me into a good German and I actually found sauerkraut that I liked. I’m not sure what was different about it, but it was almost enjoyable. After that we went to find ice cream. We were having problems ordering because the man behind the counter only spoke German, and while between James, Zoe and I we spoke 3 different European languages, none of them was German. Thankfully another American who was at the counter came to our rescue and translated for us. We started talking to him and found out that he grew up in Bucks County in Pennsylvania, which isn’t too far from where Ryan or I live, and then went to college in the same county in Connecticut that James grew up in. And to top it all off, he knew someone who graduated from Gettysburg last year. This was just a further demonstration of how small a world it actually can be some time.
Overall, I really liked Berlin. The history aspect was really interesting for me, mostly because I’m interested in that area of history. I would love to go back and take some of the specialized tours that there are. Mostly they have to do with the concentration camp that is just outside the city and different museums within the city. I also liked that it was a lot cheaper than Pairs was. Something I’ve noticed during my travels is that it is a lot easier to pick up a language when you’re surrounded by it. Every language class I’ve taken has said this, but I actually believe it based on personal experience. From being in Paris and then in Berlin, I picked up little words that I learned in context of needing them to get around at all. Because they were more pertinent to my life, they’ve actually still stuck with me. So that’s it for Berlin. I’m almost caught up….sort of….but I still have Copenhagen and Lancaster to catch up to.