20 AUG 2010 - Berlin, Germany

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Day 3: City Tour of Berlin & train ride to Warsaw

It is Friday, August 20th. I slept well for the first night...only woke up a couple times. Mom is a morning person and I'm not so she was up and ready by 7am and I didn't want to have anything to do with that hour. I sat in a bed for a little bit and checked my email and setup the RSS feed for this blog to my facebook notes. After a quick shower and getting ready Mom and I went down for breakfast. It is buffet..pretty good...alot of sandwich meat for breakfast which is strange to me...but not everyone else in the world I guess. I had come pancake/crepes with jelly for breakfast and several glasses of apple juice. We went back up to the room and brushed our teeth and got our bags ready to go. We walked to Aldi's around the corner and got a couple waters (no gas) for the day. The Aldi's here is exactly the same at home except the store labels are in German. Mom told me that the founder of the Aldi's I was used to in Washington PA was actually a German man and he had started the discount grocery store here in Germany. We loaded onto the bus at 10am and met our tour guide for the day...Johannes. Berlin is an interesting city so with much history not unlike most of Europe. It's a nice city but it's certainly not one of the prettiest cities I've seen. There is alot of architecture I liked and most of it is recontructed and reproduced after WWII. I learned more about what it was like for Germans before the wall came down and how difficult it was for them to adjust even years after.

Our bus tour went over/past alot of Berlin's cities' highlights. We started out going down one of their swankiest streets in town...Johannes called it their Champs d'Elyses of Berlin. All the major expensive stores were there just like you'd expect like Louis Vuitton...Cartier...Mercedes Benz in a regular storefront just like in Paris. We stopped first at Charlottenburg Palace which is the largest palace in Berlin and dates back to the end of the 17th century. Our next stop was Brandenburg Gate which is a former city gate and one of the main symbols of Berlin and Germany. Besides the Berlin Wall this is the only other item/attraction that automatically comes to my mind when I think of Berlin. I was kind of bummed out when I saw they had a large area around the gate closed off and set up tents getting ready for a presidential dinner that was being hosted this weekend. So I had to try and get my photographs over the tents or walk to the sides. Next thing we saw which was across the street was the Reichstag Building. The bus drove past it twice after doing a U turn so that both sides of the bus could get a good picture of the Reichstag building. There is a large grassy area in front of the building and I spotted 2 pugs being walked across the way. I got so excited and pointed them out to Mom right away. And then later we saw a black pug being walked on the street while we were on our lunch break. Pug sightings in Berlin = 3!

We stopped for lunch near the 2nd largest department store in Europe (Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe))...only one larger is Harrods. Mom heard from the tour director that Berlin had a great sandwich called a curry sausage sandwich. So we started walked down the street to look at all the different vendors and what they had to offer. We saw the "sandwich" get made. After the sausage was cooked...the chef sprinkled curry powder over the "dog" and then it gets slathered in ketchup. Very strange and Mom changed her mind after watching one get made and decided to get something else. We found a different sausage vendor and got 2 Rosterbrag (or something like this). It was good! We then walked over to the fruit vendors and looked for desert. I got a huge peach and Mom picked out grapes. We sat on a park bench and ate our fruit and while we did 2 different people asked if they could sit down next to us. One older gentlemen spoke pretty good English and the lady that sat next to mom started talking to her in German and Mom told her "sprekens v deutsch" (i don't speak German). After our lunch break we proceeded to see a section of the Berlin Wall and then Checkpoint Charlie. Very educational for me.

After Johannes left us for the day and we went directly to the train station. Porters came out to the bus and took our bags up to the train tracks for us. The station is really nice and brand new. It is a giant shopping mall with trains coming and going above them. We were on the 4:29pm train from Berlin to Warsaw. The train ride was interesting...he had compartment cars with 6 seats in each compartment. We had 6 compartments and then another compartment just for all the bags. You can walk around and walk to the ding car which is what we did and I have some pierogies....delicisous! We arrived in Warsaw at 10:15pm. And we had to wait for our bags to leave the train. Once all ready we get on a bus that will take us to the hotel. Helina gave us a drink while we waited to get the room keys. Helina told me to check the room and see if we had 2 beds or just 1 bed. Of course when we got to the ninth floor opened our door and saw 1 small bed. I had to swap out the keys to the lobby and then it was time to GO TO SLEEP!

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