Luckily, while in Prague, I managed to convince Chen to join us in Berlin- didn't really take much convincing though :) :) I was very excited to get to see her again before she left for home, and Meredith and I boarded the train in the morning back to Germany. Wellll that train ride was interesting. We actually napped really, really well on that train because we chose a random compartment and no one else ever came in so we each stretched out across the 3 seats and dozed off. When I did wake up, however, I noticed that it was time to be in Berlin... but we weren't!! Gasp! Turns out the train was delayed. Problem? Yes. Chen was supposed to be getting into Berlin much earlier than us, so I needed to warn her about our delay. Well I didn't have her French number! Dang it. Turns out it wouldn't have been helpful because my lovely friend lost her phone during a Paris Pub Crawl! Ha.
We got to Berlin 1.5 hours late but our hostel was actually right outside the main train station!! Woo! We met Chen right inside, checked in, and headed out to explore!
I had a few immediate reactions to Berlin. Number one: Berlin looks nothing at all like Munich! Totally different. Number two: Berlin is HUGE. Wow. The population is somewhere around 3.4 million which is about 3 times as big as Munich and about 2.7 million more than Aix!
The train systems were kind of a labyrinth at first, but we figured it out soon. Our first stop was the museum area where we went to the gigantic German History Museum. I kind of wish that we would have started in the more contemporary history area, but it was really neat. I feel like it would take me a good day or two to actually see everything in there. There was this extremely German security guy that yelled at me for having my fanta bottle in my hand ( it was empty!! ). Apparently it's contents- despite the fact that it was empty- were posing a threat to the artifacts inside the glass cases...
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| Beautiful :) |
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| Wait? Where are we? What river? |
We left the museum after they shuffled us out when it closed and we made our way to the Brandenburg Gate! We actually got there right at sunset, so it looked so beautiful. We snapped some pictures and then walked around the street it was on. It is a really long street with tons of cool stores and expensive restaurants. Very neat to see the gate, though.
After the gate we were starving so we decided to find ourselves a nice German restaurant. We each had something different, but I went with the Berlin classic- curry wurst. Curry wurst is a sort of sausage (go figure) with a curry/ketchup kind of sauce. It was quite delicious and went well with my tasty German beer! What? It was my last few days in the land of wonderful, inexpensive beer :) Our waitress wasn't our biggest fan though because I had the audacity to drop my fork! I think Chen might have too...geez we suck! haha
We rushed out of the restaurant and headed to a bar to meet up with a pub crawl! Haha yes, it's a trend. This particular one was packed- there were well over a hundred people in the group and it was jam packed. We were a little late to the hour of free beers so we missed out on that. The bar itself was this grimy, strange, kind of cool place with a huge fire torch in it. It seemed kind of unsafe, but really cool. Anyways it was around this point that my curry wurst was coming back to bite me. I was feeling rather nauseated but wanted to proceed with the pub crawl nevertheless!
The power-hour was over and we headed outside to get quite the fantastic introduction from the Australian tour guide.
***the following contains content unsuitable for minors. Viewer discretion is advised***
The guide gathered us all around and told us about the pub crawl and where we would be going. First he said that we should know that, legally, for the tour we needed to have metro tickets. But, then he proceeded to say that actually we didn't need them. He didn't have one. He never has one. End of story. Ha. Then he called our attention to the surrounding areas. He said that we may have noticed the large amount of prostitutes in the area- of course we had, they were the ones wearing giant boots, generally of the white patent-leather and/or fake fur variety! Anyways then he said something I will never forget:
"If your plans do not including fucking them, do not fuck with them. Do not take pictures of them, they will smash your cameras."
... good advice? Well we headed out to the next bar which was entirely too small for our huge group. We were under the impression that we got 'free shots' at the bar. Fine print... free shots with the purchase of another alcoholic beverage. Boo. Well at this point I had a horrific stomach ache, the smoke was getting to me, and it was really crowded and expensive. It took us a good ten minutes to even push our way to the bar. Ick. After that bar we decided to head back to the hostel and just have a nice relaxing night at the huge hostel lounge. Good choice!
We woke up the next day and headed out to Charlottenburg Palace. It is a massive palace!! It took a while to get there but luckily we had delicious COOKIES (my first cookies since America..aahhhh!) to last us on our walk/ride there. Once we got to the palace we headed inside for the audio guide and tour. The thing that sucks about palaces besides Versailles is that pictures are usually forbidden. Luckily Chen is a rulebreaker so you can all get a glimpse :)
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| Looks super awkward because Chen was covertly taking a picture! but this was the most beautiful room in the palace. Chen and I waltzed in it!!! |
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| Porcelain room! So pretty! |
The Charlottenburg Palace was really cool, but the audioguide was the most longwinded thing I have ever heard... it was like my methodology teacher wrote it. Yikes. We left the Palace after a few hours there and headed to the Berlin Wall. I was really excited to get to see it! I did a presentation in a class about the wall and my history seminar research paper was about post WWII Germany and clandestine relations with the Soviets, so I was anxious to see something I'd spent so much time researching.
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| Checkpoint Charlie |
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| What's left of the Wall |
The actual remnants of the wall are not by checkpoint Charlie, you just have to walk down a few blocks and there it is. It's so weird to think that when I walked to go see it, I was in "East Germany" and on the way back, "West Germany". It's difficult to imagine the wall actually being there. It seems like such a random place to just build a wall, but, hey, it happened. We took our time checking out the wall, the part that remains has some cool writing on it. Farther down from the picture I posted above is a huge painting or whatever that says "Save Our Planet".
After the wall visit we headed to somewhere oh so amazing- the Ritter Sport Chocolate World. Ahhhhhhh!! Sadly we were too late to make our own chocolate, but we certainly bought enough of it to make up for that. I think I bought 7 different kinds. Don't worry, I only kept 2 for myself. Actually no I didn't keep any of it- but I did get to taste 3 of them! Yummy. It is soooo good. I highly recommend that if you ever see Ritter Sport chocolate, buy it. Just buy it and eat it immediately!! Or share with me... :)
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| Stack of chocolates!! |
Sadly, after our amazing chocolate experience we needed to head back to the hostel so Chen could catch her train. It was really sad to see her leave, but I was glad we had some time together! Chen was actually quite interested in the German language. She learned an important lesson while she was in Berlin- be careful how you pronounce the word for street. If you're not, you'll end up calling everything an Ostrich!!
After over a week on the road, Meredith and I were burnt out so we decided on a quiet night at the hostel lounge/bar area. We took advantage of happy hour while we sat down, relaxed, and chatted. We had about 20 hours or more of travel ahead of us the next day, so we went up to our room to watch tv, shower, and sleep. That was where the relaxing ended...
During our first night our roommates at the hostel were Chen and a really nice, extremely hip asian guy! Other than Chen, our roommates were great! Haha jk Chen :) -- Actually Chen switched in to our room because there was a vomiting girl and creepy guys in here room. But back to the second night: Two rather malodorous Indian guys were put in our room. They didn't say much and some scented lotion fixed up some of the smell. When we went to bed, the first guy came back and didn't say much except for informing us that his friend would be returning late. Other than a habit of breathing extremely loudly, snoring, and making odd noises, there wasn't much wrong with the first guy.
3:30am: Pounding knocks on the door to the room. Scared me to death! I had been sleeping so well until then... the first guy lets the second guy- who is hammered- into the room. That guy proceeds to turn on the lights in the room! They talk really loudly and then the second guy gets in bed and passes out.
7:30am: Knocking on the door. Who is it? Apparently another guy looking for our dear roommates. They didn't hear him so he decided to just knock for a bit every 15 minutes until about 8am when one of them noticed and answered. Swell.
Once those two had showered and left, Meredith and I had the place to ourselves and took our time getting ready. We got some 'dunk'n coffee' donuts and fruit smoothies at the station before getting on the super long train ride to Karlsruhe. We switched there and took a train to Strasbourg and we were finally back in France. We took the night train from there to Marseille and, other than some super inconsiderate people around 3am, had a pretty pleasant journey back to Aix!
8 days, 6 cities, and 3 countries! It was the trip of a lifetime and I'll never forget it :)
Love you and miss you,
Olivia!
"Chen and I waltzed in it!!!"
RépondreSupprimerOh you two.
I can so see this in my head right now. Win. :D