When You’re Having a Good Time… Don’t Rub It In It’ll Cost You

Weird title for this one I know, but I can explain. This past weekend Kristen, Alyssa, Jenny and I went to Berlin. It was the perfect weekend because we had a 3-day weekend. Today is Monday, but it still feels like a Sunday to me. I must say Berlin was AMAZING. We had snow everywhere and it was pretty cold, but the charm and wonder of the city is impossible to ignore.

We started off the weekend by getting on a train at 3:43 in the morning. Kristen and I decided not to go to sleep, but to instead sleep on the trains. This sounded like a good idea because we were looking at 12 hours of train rides before we finally arrived in Berlin. Like I said SOUNDED. Stupid me forgot how much I can’t sleep in public- so on Saturday I slept for about 30 minutes, hour if I’m lucky.

We missed one train connection on our way, which delayed us by 2 hours. We arrived in Berlin at 6pm (18:00!) and found our hostel very easily. The hostel was great too because we ended up having a room and bathroom to ourselves. We also met 2 really nice guys from Argentina. Saturday night we walked for FOREVER trying to find this club the guy at the hostel referred us to, but that was not so successful. We ended up finding a club called Weekends where techno was the music of choice and we later learned is a high-end club. It is crazy to think that we could have been denied access to the club.

Alyssa and I at the club.

Saturday night we finally ended up in bed at 5am and turned right back around in the morning for a walking tour of Berlin. This was an amazing walk that lasted about 4 hours. To be honest I thought we were on it for much longer because of all the history we learned! We learned 800 years of history in that time. Obviously not everything, but it really was great. We talked about the Holocaust and how everything progressively went down. And for those of you who know me the Holocaust interests me a ton. I learned about and even walked over Hitler’s bunker that became his final resting place. There was an amazing memorial for all the Jews who were killed, a memorial for the tens of thousands of books that were burned just outside Humbodlt University because they were written by Jewish authors, a path marking where the Berlin Wall had once stood, and even part of the wall. Did you know there were really 2 walls? Did you also know that the wall falling was a mistake? A mistake made by one man? If you’re wondering how in the world that could happen ask me sometime.

This is the Holocaust Memorial set up. In this picture I'm in the middle of it.

There is just way too much for me to tell you about Berlin. This is one city that at least one other time in my life I will return to. There is just too much to see and never enough time to see it all.

So now it’s Monday and I am currently sitting on another one of these darn trains. (Only 10 hours of traveling this time!) And now I get to the part of the story where I say it’ll cost ya to brag. Not to say that I was bragging, but I was telling someone last night how good of a time we were having. Anyway this morning we woke up at 5 to catch a 6:17 train. We got there a little early to get our tickets for the train. We assumed that it would cost us all 37 Euro together with this awesome pass we could buy. Unfortunately we were under the impression that it would be a pass for any time not just on the weekend. That was our mistake… instead of costing us each 10 Euro to get all the way home it now cost us each 67 Euro to get to Frankfurt where we still had to figure out how to get the remaining hour and a half home. Thankfully our PC agreed to come pick us up if we paid her back for gas.

Me in front of the Berlin Dom.

Aside from the unexpected cost at the end and not actually being able to shop I had the best weekend since I’ve been here in Germany. I wish you were all here with me so you could personally witness it, but because you can’t I’ll leave you with a few pictures. Although pictures cannot account of the glory that is Berlin… it’ll have to do for now.

And a great quote from the weekend (sorry no kids this week)

Kristen to some random guy- Sprechen se English?

Random guy- I. Only. Speak. English.