European Getwaway - Day 17 - Berlin

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Day 17 Berlin

I wake up and feel dreadful, at first I blame it on the kebab but realise that I have hangover, this is the first time I’ve been hungover since I was 19. I head down for breakfast and just have some water, we then jump on the coach and head into town for our Third Reich walking tour. We meet up with our guide, an American guy called Jim, we start at the Reichstag, which currently has a stage being dismantled from the party the night before, it doesn;t make for great photos. He begins by giving us the story of how the Nazi’s came to power and how the war begun. Whilst we are stood there I feel like I’m going to throw up, can you imagine the scene, Englishman throwing up outside German parliament. Not Good.

I manage to survive without throwing up and we head around some of the areas where the Nazis ruled their evil regime, we pass the place where Hitler’s bunker was, where he committed suicide. We pass the holocaust memorial, which consists of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in several rows and of different dimensions. It is said that in the middle you feel that the slabs make you feel overpowered and lonely, I must admit to feeling a sense of domination. We head past the Brandenburg gate and the topography of terrors, the museum about the SS troops. We finish the tour at Checkpoint Charlie, it’s pretty amazing, although seems rather commercialised as there is a McDonalds right next to it. The next moment was fairly funny, as Jim (Our American Guide) finished speaking some dickhead in a van played the song ‘We No Speak Americano’ really loud, it was pretty funny.

I decide to hang around with Jaala, Tahlia, Momma Jac, Simon and Lauren. They begin by grabbing food, but I cannot stomach any yet. Tahlia, Simon and Lauren try a hotdog with what I am told is a cold sausage. We go to the checkpoint Charlie shops and I buy some Berlin wall and a shirt for my dad with the ‘You Are Leaving’ Message on it. We then head back to the topography of terrors, which also has a large section of the Berlin wall intact. Simon is interested in buying a book which has all the exhibition items in it.

We then head back to Friedrichstrasse, where Checkpoint Charlie is and the girls hit the shops, whilst Simon and I try to entertain ourselves. We head to the Mini Shop which is cool and has the new Mini Countryman, which looks pretty cool. After a bit we leave the girls and head straight for the Bugatti shop at the end of the road, which has a Veyron in the window, we are both excited and take loads of photos, I then feel a bit better and decide to get a Subway, luckily enough the process of Subway in Germany is the same as in England. We then meet back with the girls, they do some further shopping and then we go to a cafe. Where the girls buy some chips from another cafe and get told off by the guy in our cafe. We have a long chat about the trip and stuff, it’s nice to just relax for a bit. We then grab the u-bahn back to the hostel.

We briefly pop up to the bar as we all have free drinks vouchers, I have an orange juice. Tonight we have an organised pub crawl, although I can’t face another night of drinking so decide to go, but not drink. As we prepare to set off, Chin whizzes past on a bike, he is not doing the pub crawl and has hired a bike for the day, it’s pretty amusing.

We meet up with our pub guide and we all get a bottle of becks, we then hit 3 bars and a night club, the first bar is a rock music bar, which plays a bit of Beatles and Madness, I begin on a bottle of non-alco Becks, it’s not actually too bad, tastes like the alcoholic version. They also give a free shot with all drinks purchased, so I give mine away.

The next bar is a Cuban bar and I have another non-alco beer. We also get given 2 shots in this bar, which I gift to my friend Kiwi, the next bar is a bit crazy, it has a dragon in the roof which breathes actual fire, next door is a table tennis table and outside there are people smoking weed. The music is pretty cool and I have a bit of a dance. We then head to the club, which personally I think is a bit crap. The music is the normal stuff we have heard all holiday and we are the only people in there. I do however have a nice little dance with ‘She Who must not be named’ which is nice. We then leave the club and there seems to be an issue where the barman has kicked Simon out of the club and stole his Jacket. Simon is well pissed off.

Being the sober one I direct our group back to the hostel, with the assitance of our group mum, Momma Jac, which then lead to the kebab shop around the corner. I have another chicken kebab, safe in the knowledge I’ve only had one bottle of beer today and won’t see the kebab again, unlike last nights.

Tonight I also said goodbye to my fellow accountants, Lauren and Justin, they were doing the Trail to Berlin, which was the same tour but without Amsterdam and the trip back to London, they are staying in Germany for a bit then travelling to Estonia. I got on well with the pair of them, since Lauren wrote the nice love letter for me in Verona and I always enjoyed my chats with the pair of them (especially my slightly drunken chat about accounting for deferred tax), it’s about now I realise that the tour will soon be over and I will miss all these people I have grown to love over the past few weeks.

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