Berlin

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So this was my last night in Ingelheim. It has been an experience of a lifetime. I have made many new friends from a country that was previously very foreign to me and I hope that they have learned as much from me as I have from them. Christoph, Bibu, Daniel, Martin (Roberto Blanco), Andrew, and Yvonne, are people that I will never forget and it meant so much to me that they would all come out to celebrate and say goodbye to me on my last night in Ingelheim. I really hope that they will come visit me next summer with Simon.

Simon and I returned from a great trip in Berlin today and tomorrow I will pack my things and we will go to a bbq/party at a friend's house in Bonne. It will be me, Simon, Andrew, and his gf Nicole (who studied at UGA for 10 months). From there we will take a day trip to Cologne and I will leave from there to Amsterdam to start my backpacking trip. The 4 day trip to Berlin was amazing... It has definetely been my favorite city so far in Germany. We started the trip after a 4 hour drive from Munich to Ingelheim, in which we arrived at 12:30am, we then had to leave for the airport at 3:30am for our flight to Berlin. After we arrived in Berlin we checked into a hostel call 'City Hostel' at 9:30am. After a night without sleep, we still could not go to our rooms to sleep until 2pm so we ate breakfast in the hostel with about 20 young Spaniards. We then decided to walk around the city until we could get some sleep. About 1 block from our hostel a group of American guys asked us if we were going to the 'free' walking tour of Berlin. They were the first Americans that I had met since I had arrived in Germany 15 days before and it made me feel very comfortable and relaxed to be able to talk to them. Its hard to explain, but even if they were from far away from Atlanta (NY) its always nice to meet fellow Americans. I think that my attitude and the way that I acted around them was obviously different than before, just because we are used to the same culture. I guess there is a special bond that you have with people from your native country. Anyway, we decided to join them in the free walking tour of Berlin. The tour was great... I will never go to a new city without taking a tour. The guide was so knowledgeable and you see and learn things that you never would by yourself. The history in Berlin is so interesting... From WW1, WW2, the communist divide between east and west berlin, to the successful rebound to the great city it is today made this one of the most interesting places that I have ever been. The next day we took an "alternative" tour, which showed us the street art and underground lifestyle of especially east berlin. There we visited old buildings from the communist east side that were now covered completely in amazing graffiti and will soon be demolished to be made into malls, which is very sad. We also visited a very cool park type of place with a bball court, sand volleyball, bars and a beach on the river, all of which were covered in amazing street art. The most impressive part of Berlin, to me, was the East side gallery. This was a huge section on the eastern side of the berlin wall that was covered by artwork. It was probably half of a mile long and had some of the coolest art that I have ever seen, and the best part about it was that it all had so much meaning... By many artists depicting the freedom gained by the falling of the berlin wall. The most memorable section that i saw was a german flag with a jewish star in the middle. The story of how the wall fell is also verrry interesting. The nigths in Berlin were also lots of fun. We joined in on different pub crawls on 2 seperate nights and one night we just sat in a very cool bar on the east side that was outdoors and covered with graffitti with our americans friends and had some really good conversations. This morning we returned to Simon's friends apartment at around 5am. We had been hanging out with a pub crawl group and had befriended some Swedish, Norwegians, and Americans. After we woke and packed our things we had an hour and 40 minutes before our return flight to Frankfurt. When we went to open the door and walk to the train station we realized that we were locked in the apartment on the sixth floor! We tried for about 30 minutes to get a hold of simons friend for the key but were unsuccessful. She finally came back with the key about 30 minutes before our flight left, so we had to pay 30 euros for a taxi to the airport and ran all the way to the gate with 5 minutes to spare before we boarded. It was very stressful but we made the flight.

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