Berlin

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Riding from Hamburg to Berlin was nice and short but still I made it take longer by going slow, except this one time… I was riding along doing a nice 120km/hr when there is no speed limit. Now I am in the right lane where the slower cars travel and this Mercedes comes up behind me fast and wants me to move lanes because he doesn’t want to. Naturally I have no intention of doing this. So I just stay there and slow a little to about 110 now this seems to piss of the Mercedes because he gets all up my ass. I still don’t care and just cruse along because he can pass me whenever he wants there is nobody around. So finally he gets a clue and goes into the other lane and starts to pass me and naturally since it’ll be funny I start to accelerate and he again can’t pass me because he wasn’t ready for me to do this and I continue to ride along at well I don’t know the km/hr conversion but I was doing 115 mph for like a few miles and finally he catches back up to me and I move over and let him pass finally. It was fun, funny, and I enjoyed going that fast legally since normally when I would do that in my mustang in the states I would be on severe cop lookout because that would be a nasty ticket, but here it was legal so it was pretty cool.

I finally get to Berlin and there is some serious construction going on in the main city center. But I have a bike so I just go all Italian on them, (I have Italian plates so people think the rider is Italian) it’s legal to ride on the wrong side of the road and split traffic on a motorcycle, but the Italians talk it to a new level so that’s why I call it going Italian. I find my hostel like a block from checkpoint Charlie and find a free spot right in front of the building. I have had two good hostels by this point and was a little disappointed at this one but I knew I couldn’t have awesome ones every time. It was hot like no a/c and windows that only opened a little hot. But it was simple and the people at the desk were cool and liked my bike so I was able to park it inside the lower area inside so it would be a little more secure. I wasn’t too concerned about it though as I was told the Berlin hells angels were rather crazy like the ones in the states were about 20 years ago, so nobody messes with Harleys in that city for fear it is one of the angels’ bikes.

That night I went out and found an Irish pub not far from the hostel and naturally there was a football match on, (seriously I think there is one every day just so people have an excuse to drink, ). Now the game was in full swing when I arrived so I had to work my way in around the massive crowd that had gathered. But I got some good beer and a burger there and watched the game. Now since I, as always didn’t know who the team to cheer for was, I just waited for the crowd to cheer and followed suit, little note always cheer for the local team no matter what there may be and ass whoopin if you are the odd man out saw it happen once to some poor schmuck in Hamburg. The local team won and it was a good day to be winning as is any day that the home team wins a football match I have discovered.

The next day I wanted to check out everything and so I did, I started at Checkpoint Charlie, the DDR museum, I then made my way to the Berlin wall, and then off to Brandenburg Gate, and then I walked to the Berlin Victory Column before calling it a day.

Checkpoint Charlie was cool to see but nothing special, there were Germans out there in US Army uniforms taking pictures with the tourists which I thought to be funny. But there wasn’t anything really special about it anymore other than the fact of what it was and why it was there. The DDR museum was cool, I didn’t really know much about the German/Russian history and I learned a lot about it and how much it would have sucked to live back in those times. They even had one of the plastic cars they made back then to compete with the VW that failed miserably because there was a serious lack of parts for them. After seeing the car and learning about it I feel that if parts were more readily available and it was made in a different country it would have seriously made a run at being a good car. The Berlin wall, when I showed up there it was just an aweing sight. I mean most of the wall and the fences were gone but you can use your imagination and the diagrams of what it was setup like to see it and it was a serious creation. I stood there for a while and just took in what was going on trying to imagine what it was like back then. I took the train to Brandenburg Gate and there is saw amongst other things a bicycle with 6 riders all peddling to get it along its way. It was 6 people but only one had to steer the rest were just the muscle to drive, pretty cool. I also finally tried this curryworst that I heard so much about; I will try foods once, sometimes it is a bad idea but this wasn’t bad. I mean I love curry so I figured it would be pretty good, but I was unimpressed but for only €3 including a beer I couldn’t complain. Then I saw a tower off down the road and figured I would check it out, damn it was a lot farther than it looked, I mean it was only like a mile and a half each way but it was hot and no wind. It was a cool little Tower column thing about the victory from the Prussian-Danish war; I didn’t climb to the top because I was out of € by then but it was cool to just walk around and look at. I don’t know how many miles I walked that day but it was probably around 8 or so and I was tired, but not so tired I couldn’t get some beer and dinner. I found a restaurant with a big German statue holding a beer and decided that was the place to eat. As always the menu was in German and I had no idea what I was ordering, like no idea German is very difficult to figure out I think. So when my food arrived I was happy to see it was simple, 4 different kinds of sausage, salad, and some chips, (fries, frits, whatever I like chips). Now I normally don’t really care for sausage but this stuff was good all four different ones were entirely different from the other and like flavors I had never tried. The beers I had there were really good too because I was a lot farther gone after 6 beers than I normally was, but they sure were good, I managed to find my way to the hostel somehow.

The following day was my museum day, there is a section in Berlin called Museum Island and it had like five different museums on it. So I went and bought my ticket for the whole lot of them and proceeded to see the sights. There was one in particular that I was glad I saw it had the bust from Queen Nefertiti like the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. When it was discovered years ago it was an amazing find because of the amount of detail that still remained on it after all the years. I was kinda pissed though because they had a huge ordeal on no pictures. I don’t know why normally it’s just no flash but this exhibit was no pictures at all. Believe me through it sure was cool to see, and I was glad I got to see it. After the museums I went to the Berlin zoo and aquarium, terrible idea stay away from these places. I am by no means a hippie that is all about saving the animals I mean whatever, but seriously these animals just looked like they wanted to be shot. They were in cages way too small and looked like they never cleaned the pens and the fish were swimming in some of the dirtiest water I had seen. So beware of the Berlin zoo just stay away from this place. But when I finished there I walked around and found a kebab stand and got an amazing lunch followed by a nutella crepe, it wasn’t as good as the ones I had in France but still not bad. I decided to have a little fun and make a one man pub crawl again back to my hostel and I think it involved about 10 maybe 15 bars it was a long walk to the hostel but a ton of fun.

For my last day in Berlin I wanted to go to Poland simply so I could add it to the countries I visited list. So I took a ride to a small town of Poznan a few hours away had lunch and came back to Berlin just in time to grab some sushi and sake.

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Photos

Wall Parts
A section of the wall near Checkpoint Charlie

Art
The things that pass for art; this one is actually cool

Berlin Wall
Part of the remaining section of the wall

Brandonburg Gate
Pretty awesome looking indeed

Remaining parts
Another cool part of the wall that has been repainted

Bicycle?
The coolest/strangest bike ever