A wonderful weekend in Berlin

Alright, so, I just spent this past weekend in Berlin. Man did I have a great time there! I feel that I am going to have trouble explaining everything the way I would like to, because there is so much to say about so many different things. So I'll do my best and you will just have to struggle along with me.

I arrived on Friday expecting to meet up with a couple of fellow fulbright friends, Erin and Ian. Erin and I were to arrive on Friday, spend the afternoon together checking stuff out and finding a youth hostel. And then Ian was going to roll in on Saturday because he had to teach on Friday. Well, it turns out that Ian, after "a series of events" as he put it, wound up in Munich and not Bremen. The story behind that is that his train to Berlin was cancelled and before he was able to look for another train over there, he was offered a free ticket to Munich, so he took it. I don't blame him though because Munich is a great city. So it turned out to be just me and Erin for the weekend, which wasn't so bad because she is a cool girl.

So Erin and I first spent Friday afternoon wandering around the city (she termed it "being lost," but I was completely satisfied with just meandering through the city checking things out along the way) looking for a youth hostel. After finally spending too long looking for one, we called them up and then went directly to it. They didn't have any 2 person rooms available, so we got stuck in a 6 person room for the whole weekend. Quite an interesting deal there:

So on the first night, Erin and I made it back to our room (slightly intoxicated) to find it empty. We saw some things that weren't ours, so we knew we had some mystery roommates, but they hadn't returned. After hopping into our respective beds, our roommates finally showed up. And woulnd't you guess, they ended up being two other fulbrighters and a friend of theirs. What are the chances of that! Getting a room with these people in all of the available hostels in Berlin (Germany's biggest city). Needless to say, we felt very lucky to have avoided that awkwardness that was surely to come with random roommates - which is exactly what happened on the second night.

After walking through the city for what seemed like an eternity and seeing the Blue Man Group (so cool, I'll get to that), we came back to our room to find all of our belongings mysteriously missing. I started freaking out because my laptop and passport were among my belongings. We went down to the main desk and asked them about it, and they came up with some bogus reason about how it was actually booked by other people the day before, but then they just told us that we could stay there. So we lugged our stuff back to the same room and had to put new sheets on our beds (what a hassle). Later that evening we met our first roommate - a solo-traveling Japanese dude who knew very little English but whose eyes popped open when I told him that I was from Seattle ("Ichiro!!" he said). He was nice and extremely quiet. Then, after we were well asleep, our three other roommates arrived (around 3 or 4 in the morning?). They were 3 very drunk German girls who made what seemed like as much noise as they humanly could - turning

on the lights, talking on cell phones, stumbling, etc. The next morning was a little awkward, but no big deal.

Okay - Berlin. What a marvelous city. There is really too much history in this place to try to see and actually take in (not just walking up to, snapping a photo, and moving on) in one weekend. However, I think Erin and I did a great job. We decided (she really just talked me into it) on doing a 6 hour guided walking tour through the city. It was all in English, which kind of helped with digesting some of the really astonishing parts of the city. We were taken by the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, several different cathedrals, Hitler's Fuehrerbunker (the site where he and his wife committed suicide), and many other relevant places mainly associated with the Cold War. I must say, the tour was very helpful and informative (there, you happy Erin? haha).

Having learned so much about Germany's history and having actual family be affected by it, I was completely enthralled by this city abound with highly important world history. I was mesmerized by sights such as Checkpoint Charlie (Erin and I spend almost two hours in the museum that remembers it) and the Berlin Wall. It was so hard to imagine that the things that occured during those times actually did occur. Many times I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone in that era, but it nothing really does it any justice. Anyone who takes a particular interest in Germany's history or the history of WWII or the Cold War absolutely must visit this city for at lease a full weekend.

During the day on Saturday, Erin and I came across two other Americans checking out Berlin. We met the first, Craig, at Checkpoint Charlie. He is a 37 year old who is in the Navy. What a cool guy. After C.C. we invited him to have lunch with us because he was nice and was all alone. He ended up paying for lunch behind our backs, saying that it was for letting him tag along. During lunch we found out that he played in a rock band after he graduated high school and actually did some touring with the Goo Goo Dolls! He said that he knew them very well and hung out with them a lot when he was doing the band thing. Then he eventually got a college degree in social work and is now serving in the Navy. Then we met Jamie during the walking tour. She is from Southern California. She was very nice, but we didn't learn as much about her. The reason why I bring those two up is that the four of us decided to go see the Blue Man Group together after the tour!

The Blue Man Group performance was a lot of fun. We somehow got tickets in the first row. When we got there we learned that we had to wear these big rain ponchos, because the B.M.G. performance gets a little messy. Over the course of the highly entertaining and funny show, we were splattered with some paint and mushed up bannanas. The ponchos were a definite must. That being said, the show was worth every penny! Sitting on my butt enjoying the loud Stomp!-like music and theatrics was a perfect way to spend the night after walking the entire day.

Well, that is a brief summation of the myriad things that we saw/did. It was hard to try to explain my weekend in Berlin thoroughly, while trying not to bore you with an endless flood of words and paragraphs. But, of course, I have some great pictures (I took like 80 of them) to supplement my words. Without any further ado..

Photo descriptions (in order of appearance): A view of the Brandenburg Gate at dusk, Several slabs of the Berlin Wall with some historical content in between each piece (they were standing where the Wall actually ran), The booth at Checkpoint Charlie, The sign on the "American Side" of the Checkpoint, A church that was hit by a bomb during WWII and left like that as a reminder to all those who see it, A sign I saw from a 100,000 person protest (This is one of my favorite pics, it's pretty creative. The protest was against government privacy invasion and the happenings in the Middle East), A picture of an American soldier at Checkpoint Charlie looking East, A look along one of the last still-intact sections of the Berlin Wall, An artistic memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, The 4 of use after the B.M.G. show.

Well, it's only fitting that my longest post comes after a visit to Germany's largest and (in my opinion) most history-rich city. Hope I didn't bore you to death. In two days I head up North to Elmshorn to visit a friend of my mom's and her family. We then will take a train all the way to the Southwestern corner of the country and commence a week-long bike tour along the (from what I hear) very beautiful Mosel River. Stay tuned for a post detailing that! Thanks for reading.

One of the luckiest guys you know,

russ