My Time in Berlin ~ Day 1

As I type this memoir of my trip to Berlin, I am lying halfway in my room, half way on the terrace, bathing in the afternoon Hamburg sun. It is 84 degrees here with clear blue skies. :) I feel guilty for being inside, so a tentative plan for tomorrow is donning a tank top and shorts and spending the afternoon on the Elbe, reading or something along those lines. There is actually a beach. I could go there and work on a tan too. hmmmm. That comes tomorrow! (Its currently July 2nd, omigosh! Its JULY!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The night before Berlin we were all nervous about over sleeping and missing our alarms. Fortunately, none of this happened and we all showed up ready to go at 6. Our train left at 6:36, we rode for an hour, changed trains, then arrived at 10:29 AM in Berlin, Germany. The train was pretty nice, not much to say about it, wasn't too cramped, no assigned seating.

The first thing we did in Berlin was gawk like a bunch of tourists at the size of its Hauptbahnhof (Train station). Enormous. And from the outside, it is a modern glass building on the outskirts of a partially modern, partially historic looking city. We had decided previously that taking a tour straight away would be best. That way we could see and hear about what the tour companies thought was most important and decide from there where to go. With the two guys in the group standing and staring blankly into the horizon in front of the station, Sinzi and I deciphered the map and found the pick up point for the tour bus. It was pretty much just through the giant "TierGarten" (AnimalGarden) which didn't appear to have a charge to go through... we headed that way, the boys following blindly. Silly silly boys. Don't they know girls can't read maps? AND for those following along at home who know me... I most CERTAINLY have no internal compass. :P

On our walk for the bus pick-up we passed our first monument. The Reichstag. This is like the Capital Building. It has a very big, famous glass dome on top of it that people can go up in, which we did later. Initially we just took pictures from afar and kept going. Then we entered the "TierGarten". Remember, Tier=animal. Well.... no animals, besides a bunch of dogs and birds, but it was a beautiful city park. There was also a bike race going on that we ended up running into chunks of all through out the day. On the other side of the park we came to a very bustling commercial street on which we passed the actual Zoo, a really old destroyed church and eventually came to the tour buses!

The bus we had come the whole way for was one called "Bus 100" which had been highly regarded online for seeing all the city sites for £2.50. Turns out, that's because its just a metro bus. :P Fail. So instead we hopped on an actual tour bus... however, we had taken almost THREE hours to get there and we could have actually taken this same bus from the HAUPTBAHNHOF. It wasn't a big deal though, I don't think it really bothered any of us. It certainly shouldn't have annoyed the boys since they had offered no suggestions in the matter. Funny thing was, we noticed after paying that we had essentially gotten on the crappiest tour buses of those available. It was my choice and what do you know, they all followed with out double checking my whimsical decision.... :P Whatever! Ha, it works. It cost £12 and took 2 hours to see it all. The really nice things were:
1. It was in German AND English, so I could hear both and practice German but still learn the important details.
2. We got to sit in the open air up top and it was a GORGEOUS day
3. We could get off at any stop and take as long as we wanted to site see there. Another bus came every 20 minutes to continue the tour! Cool!

So, what did we see?
First, the KaDeWe ==> Kaufhaus des Westens ==> Shopping Mall of the West. Its super huge and super famous
Second. The Potsdamer Platz, which is the heart of "New Berlin" and includes the Sony Center, amongst many other things
Third. The Mauer. (Berlin Wall) In some places it is marked by only a two stone wide path, but other places the wall still stands, chipped and crumbling in the middle of the modern city. Pretty powerful
Fourth. Friedrichstraße, which is just a street that's really famous. With everything from Checkpoint Charlie, to shopping to Theater.
Fourth-and-a-half: Checkpoint Charlie. This was one of the border crossings in the American sector.
Fifth: A bunch of other cool looking and probably important buildings, see pictures.
Next: The Berliner Dom. The PRETTIEST building there. in my opinion. We didn't go inside but I wish we would have! Its this really old Protestant church that was built to be gorgeous so it could compete with the Catholics

Other points of interest:
The Fernsehturm (TV Tower) Is pretty famous, especially when you see pics of the Berlin Skyline. You can go up in it but we didn't really have any desire to. The Tower sits on Alexanderplatz, another famous platz in Berlin. While we were there, actually, they had a big, BIG outdoor display covering the history of the Wall. We just happened to go in the year of the 20th anniversary. We stayed on the platz awhile, took some pictures, it was really pretty, then reboarded. It rained a bit on us because earlier I had said "Thank goodness its a nice day" and 30 minutes later... rain. So Adrian made me take it back and knock on wood and no joke, the rest of the day was nice. :) haha. Love it

Then came "Unter den Linden" which means "Under the Lime Trees" because it is a street in the heart of historic Berlin and both sides are lined with lime trees! It is here that the Brandenburger Tur sits, as well as the American Embassy and many many many museums, the Dome, so on and so forth.

After picture taking with the Tur, we actually ran into Gladys, remember her? She is from Venezuela, was in our class and there with her son Helmut and her husband. We didn't talk long with them before heading to "Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas" or "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" or even simpler, the Holocaust Memorial. We went also through their museum there. It was free and absolutely brimming with information and story after story.

After the Memorial we hadn't eaten all day so we stopped at a cafe where the three others all got a schnitzel (pork patty thing) and I a hamburger. Whew. Okay.

After refueling, which I need to do right now typing this! We made our way back, past the Tur and to the Reichstag. There, we waited in line a little over an hour then went up to the Dome. It was really cool and really worth it. You can see my pictures of the Berlin Skyline. Finally, we were ready to find the Hostel, so we we walked back up to the Hauptbahnhof, remember, very close to the Reichstag, found out what times our train was leaving the next day (cause we didn't even know yet) and then got a train for the east side of the city where our hostel was.



Our hostel was in a less bright, not overly colored district of town, but immediately next to the East Side Gallery which I'll describe in a minute. It took a little bit of time but the hostel wasn't too hard to find. Once we did we were certainly pleasantly suprised. Because it wasnt in city center it was cheaper but they had it all. It was essentially a hotel, they had 10 or so floors with at least 10 or 15 rooms per floor. We were on the 8th floor but the elevator only went to the 7th so the last flight we took on foot. Our room was the size of my dorm room with two sets of bunk beds, a desk, dresser and TV! For those of you who haven't hosteled alot, thats really freaking nice. It was also really clean AND, to my very much surprise, we had our OWN bathroom (toilet, sink and shower) right there in our own private room.

After dropping things off Marco stayed behind to rest and Adrian Sinzi and I headed back into the city to see the Brandenburger by night. We weren't completely well informed of where to deboard so we asked some helpful Berliners on board with us. Unfortunately we asked for the wrong thing and we ended up walking about 2 miles. However, we passed the Fernsehturm, the Berliner Dom and all of Unter den Linden and so got to see it all lit up at night. Very cool :). The city was relatively bright and we never went anywhere where I felt uncomfortable or unsafe. However, I was shocked by the vacancy of the streets. Almost no one was on them.

After pictures at the Tur we spent some good time hunting down something to do, but i was tired and didn't feel like leading... which means that we didn't do anything because neither Sinzi or Adrian would step up and say what they actually wanted to do. So instead we got some late night Thai food at a train station and headed to bed.

And that was my first day in Berlin!
there are a ton of pictures, more than fit on one page so be sure to scroll through :D

---

---

---