Berlin ist Wunderbar!

WARNING: this is extremely long. If you aren't interested in reading every detail of my trip, here's the moral of the story: Berlin rules, always double-check what gate your flight is at and two days is never long enough for a vacation.

So I got back from an amazing weekend in Berlin last night. It was such a great weekend, and the only thing that was bad about it was it was too short! So I'll take you through my adventures from the very beginning:

So I took a 6:30 bus on Thursday night. I was meeting Colin at his sister's house in Navan, which is just outside of Dublin, and we were going to spend the night there and leave for the airport at 4:00 the next morning to get there for our 6:00 flight (ouch). Anyway I was supposed to take the bus into Dublin and then take it another one back out to Navan, but Denise and Linda offered to come get me at a town along the route not too far from Navan, thank god. Otherwise I wouldn't have gotten there until 11:30. So we had some chinese food and then went to bed and got a couple hours of sleep. Denise also was great enough to drive us to the airport so early, where we accidentally went to the wrong gate and had to run to catch our plane at the complete other end of the airport.

Oh and did I mention the wonderful, perfect duffle bag I got for 5 euros? Oh yeah, the strap broke when we were running through the airport, so the rest of the trip I had to carry it by the handles. And because the stitching came off, when I went to zip it up on Sunday, the zipper pull came off too. So basically it was a total waste of money and I can never use it again. Even more annoying is now I have to go shopping and find something slightly durable to take on the rest of my weekend getaways. Booooo.

Well, besides that we arrive in Berlin and the air is chilly and theres a light snow- it felt like Chicago which is refreshing after this rainy, windy cold in Ireland. We got to our hostel, the Alcatraz Hostel in Prenzlauerberg, in east Berlin. Since I don't have pictures to show you, I'll try to supplement with stock images, aka Google image search:

So that's the courtyard of the hostel. The front of it and also the lobby are covered in really cool graffiti too. Actually one of the cool things about the area we were staying in and most of east Berlin is that there is Graffiti everywhere. Since it started by graffiting the wall, I think they see it as part of the culture and don't paint over it to make the city look cleaner. It totally adds to the feel of the neighborhood.

Well we checked in and took a little nap, probably for longer than we should have. But anyway when we got up there was a full-on blizzard going on. But since we hadn't seen any of the city yet, we decided to brave it and go do some sightseeing. So we took the U-bahn down and then walked down Unter den Linden, a really famous street lined with hundreds of Linden trees. Not as impressive in winter, but many of the embassies are on this stretch of road too, most notably Russian:
So we went down to the end of the street, which is marked by the Brandenburg gate:
Wow, these are much better pictures than I could have taken anyway. Maybe this is better than a digital camera haha!
Anyway that was awesome to see, and I took a bunch of pictures of Colin standing under it to get the feeling of how absolutely enormous it is.
Then we went through the gate and crossed where the wall used to be to the Reichstag- the parliament building.
It's a really incredible building, since it nearly burned down in 1933, and wasn't completely rebuilt until the mid-90s. The outer structure still has the original architecture, but the inside is pretty modern and conceptual. We waited outside in the blizzard for about 45 minutes, but when we finally got in it was worth it. The lobby is huge with a 100 ft-tall ceiling and glass walls. We went straight up to the glass cupola:

Where you can walk around the dome and see all over the city. It was pretty amazing, but hence the blizzard and the fact that it was pretty dark out already, we couldn't see very far. In the middle though there's tons about the history of the building and different historical events and protests which took place around it. And if you look down in the center you can watch the actual proceedings of parliament. This, according to Rick Steves, is supposed to represent the German people being able to look over the shoulders of their representatives.

After that we went back to the hostel and got changed, and Carrie and her friend Mike met us to go to dinner. We went to a great Mexican place (real German, haha). One of the great things about being in Berlin was how cheap everything was compared to Ireland. For a huge burrito, rice, beans and a margarita, it was only about 9 Euro. Thats probably about how much you'd pay for just a margarita here. Amaaaazing!

From there me, Carrie and Colin went around the area and did some bar-hopping. The bars were all so cool. The first couple we went to were lit with a red glow and felt pretty swanky. The last one, where we spent most of the night, was really bohemian. All the furniture was mis-matched like it all came from a garage sale. One interesting thing about the bar scene is that most German students tend to be older, like mid-20s, so the crowd is much more relaxed. Strangely though this does not mean PDA is frowned upon. At one point there were 4 couples surrounding us just full on making out (including 2 who we were sharing a table with). Ew.

Most interesting about the bars however, is that they don't close. Ever. So when we went home at 4, there were tons of people just heading out. And they also have tons of food stands for bratwurst and kebabs that are open all the time, so the streets are bustling all through the night. It's pretty cool.

So the next day we woke up at like 12:30 and were ready to go do some sightseeing, but we were going to meet up with Carrie for breakfast first. This was a disaster. Right when she called me to give me directions I ran out of credit, so she texted me to get on the tram to meet her, neglecting to tell me the name of the restaurant or the stop to get off at. This turned into wasting about an hour and a half trying to find each other. Colin and I finally just stopped into a breakfast place and had this really amazing buffet. Then we headed off to go sightsee, but most of the day was gone already so we didn't get to do much.

We took the U-bahn to Friedrichstrasse and then wandered through the Gendarmentmarkt, a square surrounded by the German Cathedral, the French Cathedral and the Berlin Symphony concert hall. Here's an aerial view-->

Then we walked down Friedrichstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie. We stopped and read some of the history of that lines the street leading up to it, and took some pictures of the actual checkpoint box and the sign announcing "You are now leaving the American Sector"/"You are now entering the the American Sector." It's interesting because I was talking to my mom last night about it, and she was telling how when she visited back in the 70s her tour group had to go through the checkpoint and have all their passports checked to enter East Berlin. So it was pretty surprising to her that we never really left the east side.

Right next to the checkpoint is the Museum of The Wall. This was really awesome because it gave the complete history of the Wall. I thought the most interesting exhibits were the ones that focused on the escapes. Some of them are just incredible- like one woman hiding in suitcases, another woman inside an amplifier, a few cars with certain parts of the engines removed, etc. There were tons of photographs of escapes, successful and unsuccessful. It also had a lot of history about the protests which took place on the West side of the wall, and the events leading up to its demolition.

Next we wanted to go to the Topography of Terror exhibit, on the grounds of the command center for the Gestapo and the SS, which details the history of the Nazi party and its victims. But it was closing as we were leaving the museum, so we decided to wait around a few minutes and catch a tour bus to take us all around the city, including into the west which we hadn't really seen yet. However, the schedule that I had picked up earlier in the day at the Gendarmenmarkt was wrong and it had already stopped running. We were really pissed off about that, and that's really the one thing I'm mad that I didn't do. It's too bad because we should have gotten on at the Gendarmenmarkt, but we didn't have cash then so we decided to wait. Oh well, I'll just have to go back ;)

So then we went back to the hostel, changed and packed up all our stuff. We really wanted German food, so Carrie met us at the hostel and we walked over to a place recommended by Rick Steves, but it was closed (unless the back-entrance to the weird club we walked into had anything to do with the restaurant). So Carrie took us to her favorite Imbiss ("second-tier" restaurants, very cheap) to eat, where I had a great pizza. Then we walked to her friend Sanka's apartment, and on the way walked through this really cool old brewery which has been converted so it has a walkway running through it lined with clubs and bars. Then we picked up Sanka and were on our way to a bar when a new "shortcut" got us lost. So instead we just walked into a random bar that was closest to us.

This was quite an experience. The bar was called "Yesterday" and advertised the 60s, 70s and 80s. The whole place was decorated in an extreme 60s theme: beaded curtains everywhere, plastic sunflowers on the ceiling, flowered carpet on the walls, disco balls and crazy lights everywhere- totally nuts. There was also a mannequin seated at the bar, playing with a sunflower, drinking a bottle of Heineken and looking scarily real. We got the feeling that everyone there had literally been there for at least 24 hours, and that newcomers were not particularly welcome. We also noticed that everyone in the bar was wearing black. Everyone. We thought that it was probably some kind of front for a drug ring. The whole place was brilliant.

We had a few beers there and then headed home so we could get some rest for our morning flight home. We took the train out to the airport, went to the wrong gate again, had a much more comfortable flight to Dublin and then I took a bus back to Galway, which was actually pretty fast. Anyway, this entry is ridiculously long. I'll end it now.