July 13 (Sleeping Pills):
Our group had left this weekend sort of open ended when we were doing our initial planning. We came to a consensus that it would be good to spend one more weekend in Germany since our Munich trip was such a success. And what better place than its capital, Berlin. We waited a while to decide and were thus late booking our train tickets. Because of that, we were not able to claim couchettes for the long overnight trip across Germany. I wasn't looking forward to ride, but having been privileged enough to have them for all of our other overnight trips, it was about time that I roughed it. After class on Friday we had plenty of time to ready our bags and fix a good dinner before our train left at 11:30 pm. Around 9, Jeff and I wandered over to the turkeys' dorm to join forces and walk to the station. Arriving just in time, we headed to platform 1 to wait on the train's arrival into Metz. We had our fingers crossed that our seat reservations wouldn't be in a 6 person compartment, and rather in the normal rows of seats. Just our luck, they were compartments. Gleber, Jeff, and I had bought our tickets together so the 3 of us were sharing upright sits with 3 strangers. They were normal looking so that was one worry crossed off the list. Jeff and I had bought some mild sleeping pills because we knew that the lack of sleep could potentially ruin a day of travel. After swallowing one tiny pill, 20 minutes later I was feeling real ready to fall asleep. I remember being half asleep, half awake trying to get comfortable for a while and then eventually settling in.
July 14 (Museum Island):
Jeff shook me awake at about 8:30. I was still groggy until I drove a big ole McDonald's coffee into me at the train station. I had turned over the reigns on navigation to Hayden, who had booked our hostel. He led us up to the top level of the station where we waited on a regional train that acts as a subway. They call them
S-Bahn. We hopped on the line S75 to Alexaderplatz, where our hostel was located. It was a short 5 minute walk from the station to Pangea People Hostel. We filled out our forms and then dropped our bags in the luggage room until we could actually check into our rooms at 3. Jeff was right that I would jinx us with all my boasting about how great weather had followed us on our travels. Right was we were heading back towards the station, it started raining. Few of the turkeys had prepared for rain, so I lent a couple of them some of my rain proofing items. We decided it would be best to spend the day doing inside activities instead of battling the weather at the Berlin Wall. I took charge of the map, and we set off for Museum Island. It was exactly what its name says. Five different museums on this one small island in the river that runs through Berlin. Hayden, Andrew and I stood in line for tickets while the wet turkeys took cover from the rain.
(Danal, Jeff, Mike, and Gleber)
The student tickets were only 7 euros for all five museums, which was a good price to redeem our low productiveness from the previous weekend. We started out at the Neues Meuseam, which hosted many ancient Egyptian exhibits. The famous bust of Nefertiti was kept here, but unfortunately that was the one thing you couldn't take pictures of. Next we moved onto the Altes Museum, next to the beautiful Berlin Cathedral which was also on the island. Most of the exhibits here were from ancient Greece and Rome. The weather started to clear up, so we decided to make our last stop at the Pergamonmuseum, which housed full rebuilt structures recovered from all over the world, as well as exhibits from the ancient Middle East. Here's our journey through all three.
Egyptian tombs in Neues
Old parchment in Neues
Sarcophagus in Neues
Jeff and I in front of the Berlin Cathedral
Statue in Altes
Statue of Caesar(?) in Altes
Reassembled Greek building front at Pergamonmuseum
Five turkeys
Mosaic archway at Pergamonmuseum
After we left museum island, we decided we should take advantage of the nice weather since the forecast for the next few days didn't look to be in our favor. We got back on the S-Bahn and rode to the Freidrichstrasse station, where we found a grocery store to pick up some lunch and a 6 pack of beer to split between pairs. We carried our bags to Tiergarten, a big area of green space in the center of the city. We caught a quick glimpse of the Brandenburg Gate on the edge of the park, right before we went in. We strolled all the way through and got a quick look at the tower in the center. We climbed aboard another
S-Bahn on the other side of the park and rode back towards our hostel.
(Mike and Andrew walkin' and talkin')
(Gleber)
(Andrew and happy Danal)
(Taking a rest at the foot of the Victory Column)
Back at the hostel, it was time to finally check in. Hayden had booked all 7 of us to stay together in an 8 bed room, but when we got our keys we had been split up into two rooms. We drew key cards and divided up. Mike, Andrew, Gleber and I got a 6 person room on the fifth floor while Jeff, Danal, and Hayden got an 8 person room a floor below. My group was sharing the room with two girls from Turkey, who I'm sure weren't too happy when 4 smelly boys walked in. It sounded like the other group had some roommates who were a bit more odd. Anyways, we got our belongings situated in the lockers and took showers to get ready for dinner. Mike, Andrew, Gleber and I headed out a bit ahead of the other group to the Hofbrauhaus right down the street from our place. We got a beer and ordered our dinner. Mike and I both went to town on some bratwurst and sauerkraut, which was just as good as I remembered from Munich. The other 3 turkeys showed up just as we got our food, so we all sat and drank and dined together in the legendary German beer hall.
Once we had had our fill of the Hofbrauhaus Dunkel, we settled the bill and left the iconic restaurant. We rode the elevators up to the sixth floor at our hostel, where there was an in house bar. We drank and played pool until it was time to walk down one flight of stairs and sleep off our first day in Berlin.
(Gleber, ready for bed.)
(Hayden helping his pledge brother to bed)
July 15 (The Wall):
Mike and I woke up around 9:30 and one by one, tried to awaken the rest of the troops. We all showered and headed upstairs for breakfast served in the bar. It was by far the best hostel breakfast I've had to date. Toast, scrambled eggs, deli meats, cheese, yogurt, fruit, coffee, apple juice. I made a big ass breakfast sandwich, that along with my coffee, got me ready to explore. We planned our day, and set out for the S-Bahn. Our first stop was a section of the Berlin Wall that was still standing on the East side of the city. It was surreal to see such an iconic piece of recent history standing right in front of you. We walked along the upright concrete slab, checking out all the graffiti and murals painted onto it. We even signed our names.
(My favorite one. No idea what it says)
(Greetings from America! - Courtesy of Fat Mike and the Dirty Boys)
(Hayden, Andrew, Danal, Gleber, Me, Mike, Jeff)
(Left my mark.)
We left the wall and headed downtown to continue our journey through the Cold War by visiting Checkpoint Charlie.
(Notice the micky d's in the background)
Next on our agenda was the Holocaust memorial. We weren't sure what to expect because the map hadn't given us a description, but we were pleasantly surprised. It was like a concrete jungle gym. The best way to show the design is by pictures, I think.
Right up the road, we returned to the Brandenburg Gate to get a better look than the previous day.
Next up on this action packed stretch of road, Reichstag, the home of German Parliament.
After an action packed day, it was time to wind down. We got dinner at a sausage stand, and walked back to the S-Bahn. We grabbed some Beck's and found a little park near our hostel where we sat, drank, talked, and laughed.
It was a wonderful day, not to mention the fact that we didn't see a drop of rain despite the 100% chance of rain forecast. We went back to the hostel and deliberated on what we should do that night. Danal and Jeff convinced the rest of us to do the Berlin Bar Crawl. I knew it wouldn't live up to the one in Prague, but we had a big group so I knew it would still be a great time.
... To be continued... I have to start my homework
CONTINUED
So. We all left the hostel at around 8 and arrived at the meeting point, outside of a coffee shop, one S-Bahn stop away. We paid our 12 euros, got wristbands to show the bartenders we were part of the "crawl", and received our free Becks beer (singular). We stood in a circle and talked while we waited for the departure at 8:45. A guy tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would take a picture of him and his two lady friends. We commenced in conversation.
"Are you all from Australia? I recognize the accent."
"Yeah. We're from Perth," said the guy.
"Cool. I know a band from Perth. Have you heard of Tame Impala?" (I was about 30% sure of this claim
which, if you are familiar with probability, isn't very good odds).
"Oh yeah I think so," one of the girls chimed in.
"Here let me sing you some, 'You will never come clooose to how I feeeeeel~'"
Laughter
Enter Gleber. "Hey where are you guys from?"
In unison, "Australia"
"Oh cool. I've been told I do a pretty good New Zealand accent." He does the accent. Laughter.
"Have you all seen Finding Nemo?" I asked.
"No, I'm not a kid," the Australian alpha male answered frankly.
Right about then, some shouting broke out between some homeless guys sitting down behind us. We had been giving our empty beer bottles to the one doing the yelling so that he could recycle them for money. The victim remained calm during the episode, even after being swatted with a tree branch. We switched our allegiance and gave him the beer bottles instead. Shortly afterwards, we gathered around our bar crawl leader and she led us to our first destination. For the rest of the evening, the seven us tried to come up with nicknames for each member of Fat Mike and the Dirty Boys. The roster concluded as follows:
Big Fat Retarded Mike
PSO Danal
Thigh Master (Gleber)
Chocolate Boy (Andrew (who's middle name is Skinner))
Skinner Jr. (Hayden)
Crusty and Rusty (Me and Jeff)
We hopped bar to bar, and nothing really exceptional happened. We got a round of shots at each place for 'free' and got discounts on beer. We did meet a guy from UVA who was working in Berlin for the summer. He was by himself, so we initiated him into the Dirty Boys.
(Bar #1. Cheers)
(Bar #2. Rusty pounding one back, alone, at the bar. Our UVA friend is in the green shirt.)
(Bar #3. "Watch out boys. Rusty's got that look in his eye")
When we arrived at Bar 4 out of 5, it was closed. Mike, Hayden, and I decided that that was our cue to head back to the hostel. We left the other 4 to continue to the last bar while we went into the city, guiding ourselves home. We were walking through a very urban area of town very late at night, so we were very startled when we heard someone yell, "Hey!" It was a group of teenage French . They ran up to us and asked if we spoke English. We replied, "Yes", in English. They then asked us if we knew where a bar was and we told them to follow us back to our hostel where there was a bar upstairs (Sounds like child abduction out of context). They were 5 of them and they were from Paris, celebrating Bastille Day with a little trip to Berlin. Mike and I practiced our French, which we were surprised was actually pretty decent. We hadn't done too much conversing in French outside of class, especially since we have Jeff to handle all the communication. The walk there took longer than the 10 minutes we had promised and our new friends were getting impatient by the time we finally saw the glorious "Pangea People" sign. We celebrated as we climbed on the elevator up to the 6th floor. Of course, not realizing it was 2:45 in the morning, the bar was closed. We felt horrible that we had led these guys on a wild goose chase, but they assured us that they had had a good time hanging out with us anyway. So did we. Tired from an action packed day, Mike, Hayden, and I hit the hay excited to hear the stories from the night of the rest of the Dirty Boys.
July 16 (70's Express):
We woke up in time to feast at the hostel breakfast bar again before our train at 10:30. Jeff, Mike, Andrew, Hayden, and I swapped stories over hot coffee and scrambled eggs. Andrew had left the bars shortly after us and Jeff took a cab back to the hostel about 30 minutes after that. No one was quite sure what happened to Danal and Gleber, who were still asleep. We shook them awake just in time to make it to the station as our train arrived. We had a long first leg from Berlin to Mannheim, where the two late nighters rode in what looked like a state of pure hangover misery. We were seat hopping around as people with reserved places bumped us out. We were travelling like real Eurail passers. Hayden ended up in a compartment with an older German novelist who saw his 'Texas' shirt and immediately began spilling his love for American country music. He promised Hayden some of his bottle of Jack Daniels, that he magically pulled from his bag like a rabbit from a top hat, if he could sing him 'Dixie'. The ride was long but productive. I finished my book for Ethics class that critically looks at the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Probably my favorite case study of history. In Mannheim, we arrived late and thought that we had missed our connection to Saarbrueken, but that train was running 20 minutes behind so Jeff and I got to keep our record of no missed trains all summer. We climbed aboard the relatively empty train and split up into two compartments. Jeff, Mike, and I shared one with a middle aged woman and her young son. She was a PhD in Biology and had worked in Honolulu for a few years. Originally from Berlin, she now lived in Homburg, not to be confused with Hamburg. The train car was one of a kind. Wood paneled walls, huge fluffy seats, what might as well have been shag carpeting, and an ash tray within arms reach everywhere in the train. We joked that "We were riding the 70's express through time and space." Halfway to Saarbrueken, our new acquaintance got off in Homburg and the 3 of us had the compartment to ourselves. I had just downloaded some perfect theme music suited for the rest of our ride, and we listened through the whole album on my iPhone speakers.
(Hop aboard the groovy 70's Express.)
(Donnie and Joe Emerson's Dreamin' Wild, 1979. Don't judge an album by its cover. While to the naked eye it looks as cheesy as Donnie and Joe's giant collars, but this LP has some great tunes.)
We made it back to Metz, after a very eventful train ride. The weekend was full of history and good times, one of the better balanced trips we've taken. After two trips through France's neighbor to the East, I decided that you can never go wrong with travel in Germany. The prices are fair, everyone speaks English, the trains are convenient, the cities feel safe, the food is good, and the beer is better.
Check back in soon for the post on our last trip of the summer.
Alvederzein!
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