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Published: February 16th 2010
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Another weekend trip! This time we went with Berlin in honor of the 20th year of the fall of the wall discount. We stayed near Alexander platz in the Wombats hostel. Second experience with them (Vienna previously) and second great experience with them, highly recommend. First things first, food! There is an Italian place just down the street that had great pizza and was covered with old punk bands, punk Italian guys, and once again delicious pizza. The sun was gone by this time, so we basically focused on getting a beverage at the bar at the hostel (first drink free). Everyone knows the purpose of that free drink is to get you to pay for a couple more, so we played a little asshole and pregamed for a bit. We left the hostel in search of bars to have a chill night and found a couple places that were precisely that. We enjoyed the evening with a couple beverages and hit the sack early.
The next morning we took advantage of one of the free tours the hostel advertised. However it didn’t start very well, because either my bag was wet or my shirts sat wet in the washer
for too long, so all of my clothes smelled very very very very bad! Moving on though… We met up with a bunch of other people in the same boat and started the tour at the Brandenburg gate. The tour was great; we saw all the standard tourist things in a few hours. The tour guide told us things that walking around or researching them we would not have known. For example the hotel near the Bradenburg gate is $15,000 a night and that is where Michael Jackson held the baby over the balcony. The city representative (bear) has nothing to do with the name of the city, Bear lin. Hitler’s former bunker is only a patch of grass now, where the “neighborhood dogs shit” now. The empty bookshelves in the Bebelplatz , representing the burning of books. The most interesting to me was the Hof being responsible for tearing down the wall, because he sang on it just before it went down. The story of how the wall went down was interesting. There was basically a news conference and the speaker was not prepared with the information, so when he was asked questions about when the wall was coming
down he didn’t know what to say. So, as he fumbled through the report, he basically said the worst/best/last thing he could have said, which was East and West will be reunited… they asked when… he fumbled some more and said effective immediately! It didn’t go exactly how it was supposed to, but this naturally caused a very large party.
After the tour we went to the East Side Gallery. On the way there we went into a smaller art place that was filled with sand. It was set up like a beach on the river and had lots of old things turned into art and paintings on the walls. The actual gallery was cool, lots of murals, some more interesting then others, but all very interesting. We were all exhausted after this, so we decided to take a nap, grab some dinner, and do a put crawl.
We had giant American hamburgers for dinner! They were great, however very filling and we regretting eating so much because one cannot really enjoy a pub-crawl when you are ridiculously full of food. With this in mind we decided the free beer at the first place wasn’t that great of an
idea, so we focused on a couple Jaeger shots and sat out back of this bar. We went to a few different bars to get a taste of what Berlin was all about; one bar gave us free Jaeger with each drink we purchased. The walk from bar to bar was funny, because the pub-crawl leader warned us about the prostitutes along the way. He told us if you must have one, we are not responsible for you!! We do not condone this and would rather you not… but have at it if you need too. It was interesting watching them, they actually choose who they want to have sex with, so we were outside a bar and watching prostitutes stop guys. We decided not to go to the club after; we stayed at an Irish pub and drank Guinness 250 instead. The pub-crawl was fun; I recommend it.
The next day we went to Potsdam. We walked around the palace, lost Carlos, and then walked up a hill. The palace was very similar to the one in Vienna. We didn’t want to go around the entire palace or walk down the path that takes us out of the
way, so we jumped a fence and climbed down the backside of the palace instead. We found this old style pillars and climbed up on them. The only issue was that getting up and down was difficult, I basically threw Katherine up there and then just pulled myself up. Getting down was another issue… jumping was the only option; a pair of chucks is not the best landing shoes. The Christmas markets were being put up and everywhere we looked the food spelled amazing. We found a little park on the way back to the train station and played in a spinning thing… The inner child is something you should not conceal.
Back to Berlin, back to Cologne, and back to University in the morning
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