Berlin!

So here I am a week later and I can finally blog about my adventures in Germany :) ACT may not give a lot of homework, but for some reason all of my professors decided to hand it to me all at once! (Exam, position paper, quiz, project... etc) Of course it had to be the one time I actually went somewhere but anyways....

I flew directly from Thessaloniki to Berlin so that was pretty nice. We used EasyJet which has pretty cheap flights, roundtrip I spent about 250 US Dollars- which is less than trips I've taken from Minneapolis to San Francisco! We left Saturday morning at about 11 a.m. and we arrived in Berlin around 1 p.m. (Germany is one hour behind Greece) We bought the "Berlin Welcome Card" which was the smartest decision I made all weekend! With this card, we got to ride ALL public transportation unlimited for 72 hours. We also got into museums with a discount, all for only 25 Euro which I thought was a very reasonable price. We did use the S Bahn (train above ground) at every chance we got. We used the U Bahn as well, which is an underground train like a subway.

I went with 3 other people, Dewey and Megan who are both UWEC students that I knew before coming here, and Caitlin, a studet from Florida (University of South Florida-Tampa). Megan had some friends there she wanted to see and Caitlin speaks some German so they were good travel companions to Germany!

As soon as we left the airport, we took the S Bahn to our hostel, which we had booked in advance online. It was 15 minutes from the airport - THE OTHER AIRPORT... not the one we flew into! It was actually 55 minutes away from the one we went to. Ooops... It wasn't a big deal it was just kind of funny when we realized we had directions from the other airport. But we got there. The hostel was really nice! For only 11 Euro a night, you can't really complain. Plus, we had a 4-bedroom private which meant that it was only the 4 of us in the room. Plus the hostel wasn't super crowded or anything so the bathroom situation wasn't bad. After we put all our stuff down, we went walking. The hostel was across from the train stop and there was a long street full of shops and stuff to do. We got some curryworst at a nice little shop with a really nice German woman running the shop! She was laughing at us a little bit because we were taking pictures of our food... I would have laughed at us too. Curryworst is pretty much just sausage with fries, I'm not really sure what it was but it was good!

We shopped a little bit down the busy street until about 9 p.m. when we were picked up by Megan's friend "Biggie". He was an exchange student at her high school a few years ago and apparently nobody can pronounce his real name so he just goes by Biggie. (He's Turkish) It was his girlfriend's birthday so we were going to tag along at the bday party which was at a karoke bar. When we got there the waitress told us that happy hour was just ending, but she would let us get the happy hour prices on our first order. So what do we do? Order 2 drinks apiece, of course. This was BEFORE I learned that B52's have rum in them... but that was very apparent later (rum and I do NOT get along). I also had German beer that was mixed with Orange Fanta soda which sounds disgusting, but it's not beer like you are thinking. It is a creamy smooth light beer meant for mixing with other drinks. It was basically a beer creamsicle, as my roommate pointed out later. It was amazing!

So after much German beer, Dewey and I sang a duet "Summer Nights" from the Grease soundtrack. I kept saying that we had to sing something from "GREASE" (hahahaha, get it guys?? Cuz we came from GREECE??!!!) Yes, I am a dork.

That was my first experience with karoke. It was lots of fun though, especially to hear the German people all singing American songs. There was definitely some Britney Spears and Backstreet boys! We were all laughing and singing along. Biggie was very impressed by my rapping skills and made me sing a rap song... I picked Ms Jackson by Outkast because that was one of the only rap songs on the list that I kind of knew. Well you can imagine how THAT went... I know Megan recorded it but I haven't seen it yet...

The next day we decided to take the free walking tour of East Berlin. Which lasted 3.5 hours and it just so happened to RAIN the whole time. That was fun. It was really cold and I forgot my umbrella at the hostel, but hey, at least I had my Columbia jacket with the hood. It was a really interesting tour. I never knew much about Germany, but Berlin was pretty sweet. I saw the Berlin wall, walked over Hitler's bunker (where he committed suicide), saw one of the only remaining Nazi buildings, and some other crazy stuff. It was all pretty heavy stuff. There is also buildings around from the 18th/19th centuries and the time of Fredrick the Great (but there was so many Fredricks I forget which ones were which) who apparently attempted to create religious freedom for all and built multiple churchs around one spot to open up Berlin to immigrants. It was a little sad to think about what happened later in the same spot that had been declared for freedom of all-there was a huge Nazi Book Buring in the square later in history. It is next to the University where Albert Eistein, Karl Marx, and others attended.

That night we went out with Megan's other German friend from high school, Svetlana and her boyfriend Peter. We went out to dinner and a hookah bar. It was fun to hang out with them because they didn't take us to loud or touristy areas, just cool little places that were fun to just chill out at. Lots more German beer was consumed! Not by me, by Dewey. We're determined to find some of this back home. I told him that if we can find it anywhere in the States, Wisconsin would be the right place to be!

The last day, we went to Museum island. First we went to the German Historical Museum then after that to the Pergammon. The Pergamon is AWESOME. I saw the Ishtar Gate, which was part of the Walls of Babylon-built in 500ish BC. Crazy. I can't even explain how it feels to see this stuff-inside a museum no less. It is just HUGE. The Pergamon Altar was pretty amazing. That is the first thing you see once you walk in. Built by the Greeks as a temple to Zeus. I really can't wait to go to Athens, to see the things in their original places. For the curious ---> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Museum)

After that, we went to the top of the TV tower which was built before the fall of the wall, by the East Germans. It kind of reminds me of the Space Needle for those of you that do not know what it is (I had never heard of it until I was there). We saw the whole city from the top at night which was beautiful all lit up! Then we had dinner at the revolving restaraunt at the top which was pretty sweet. We stayed up there for 3 hours. Then we left and walked around town to take some night pictures.

Then we took the train to the airport at about 1 a.m. We got there around 2 and tried to sleep on some couches. Our check in started at 5:30 a.m. I of course could not sleep for some crazy reason. I've been having trouble sleeping on trains, buses, planes, pretty much everywhere. We got back to Thessaloniki around 11:30 a.m. and I didn't have class til 2 p.m. but I was so exhausted from not sleeping for over 24 hours I just crashed on my bed for the rest of the day!

So that was my Berlin adventure. It was really fun! I would recommend the city to any one that wants to travel. It was definitely up there for me as one of my favorite places I've seen so far. SO FAR is the key sentence here... I still have a lot more to see!

Thanks to everyone that made it to the end of this post, I had a lot to say.