Watch out Mike, this one'll blow your socks off!

Okay, that damn keener Nicole already wrote about Berlin, so I guess that I have to, too.  I highly recommend looking at her blog entry for November 6, so that you can see more pictures, but I will try and post some as well.  I will also take a different approach than she did; ladies and gentlemen, I present you with paragraphs!

So, as I mentioned I kind of forgot that we were going to Berlin last weekend.  These things really sneak up on you!!  I did remember with plenty of time to get ready, though.  See, the thing is that we were leaving at 12:30 am on Friday.  I want to clarify that this means half past midnight where Thursday turns into Friday.  I am fortunate, in that I have a class on Thursday from 9-11 and then my weekend starts.  So I spent the day packing and straightening my hair (remember, curly hair doesn’t travel well).  Yes, it took all day.  I bought a really cheap hair dryer and I can’t use it for more than about 6 minutes before it overheats and I have to wait until it cools off to use it again (yes, I am thinking of investing in a more expensive one), so I spent most of the day with a Pebbles Flintstone-esque ponytail on the top of my head because I had to dry my hair layer by layer over the course of several hours.  It was painstaking, but I got done and packed in plenty of time to go with Nicole to meet Chris and Diana for drinks at a little pub right near the University (Katie joined a little later).  They all made fun of me because I brought a backpack and a small suitcase, whereas they all only had backpacks, but I was the only one who was fully prepared, so there!

We met at the bus at 12:30.  Sorry, what I meant to say was that we met where the bus was supposed to be at 12:30, but the bus didn’t come until 12:50, which was kind of a burn, and then we waited around a little bit longer for anyone who was running late (as far as I was concerned, they’d already had 20 minutes) and ended up leaving some Japanese guy behind.  He might have also been confused by the instructions, because I know that I had to explain to several people that we really were leaving in the middle of the night on Thursday/Friday.  Anyways, we headed off about 1:00 am and I pretty much slept until we stopped at, like, 4:00.  Used the washroom, paid the 50 cents because I don’t really care (if this sentence doesn’t make sense, you didn’t read Nicole’s entry), had a tea, got back on the bus.  More driving, some sleeping, but not as much, another stop (even though we were, like, 45 min. away from Potsdam, what a waste), and then we finally arrived in Potsdam at about 8:30 (I think).  It was pretty nice; we wandered over to the summer castle of Friedrich the Great.  He was crazy.  Gay and crazy.  Then we wandered around on our own for a bit, mostly in the Dutch quarter until we had to meet back at the bus at 1:00.  I bought a necklace while we were wandering around.  Come to think of it, I have no idea where that necklace is.  Damn it!  Seriously, no joke, I haven’t seen it all week and I think I might have left it in the hotel.  Crap.  That sucks.

Okay, so then we drove the rest of the way to Berlin.  We drove into this terrible neighbourhood with all this graffiti everywhere and I thought to myself, “Yeah, 2 nights and the transportation and all this other stuff included all for the low price of 80€?  I should have known we’d be staying in the ghetto.  I hope that the rats are small, and that the shared bathrooms are clean.”  So Patrik hands out a sheet where you have to sign up for a roommate, since it’s 2 to a room.  Well, Chris and Diana go together, naturally, and then that leaves Nicole, Katie and me.  That’s three for those of you following along.  So I decide to be brave and get the mystery roommate.  I tell Nicole and Katie that they can go together and I will see what’s behind door number 2.  Well, when I get up to the front of the line to get my key and find out who my roommate is, I see that I have a room to myself.  Score!!  If you remember earlier, we left a Japanese guy behind, making us an odd number, so I didn’t end up with a partner at all.  I talk it over with Patrik (group leader) and the clerk and we agree that I will sleep in this room tonight and will switch to a single room tomorrow.  Great, no problem.  Well, I get upstairs and the room’s got 3 beds in it.  And it’s gorgeous.  It has 3 beds in it and it’s gorgeous!!  So we do some quick work and Katie and Nicole come move in with me.  We Canadians are very industrious.  The room was so gorgeous I can’t even describe it.  I took pictures, but I don’t think that they do it justice at all.  It had 10’ high ceilings, and a huge bathroom; the beds were super comfortable and had crisp sheets on them.  This was actually a 3-star hotel that is just in kind of a rough neighbourhood, but they take safety measures and stuff at night, so it’s all good.  Anyways, enough fawning about the room; on with the story.

After checking in, we hopped on the bus and got dropped off at an U-Bahn station (by the way, in case I haven’t mentioned it in regards to Munich, U stands for ‘unter” which means ‘under’, as in ‘underground,’ and Bahn means ‘train’ so the U-Bahn is the subway.   And when I say things like, “We took the U6,” it means that we took the U-Bahn #6 to wherever) where we had to buy tickets.  Everyone else (35 people) gathered around the one ticket machine that was at the end of the platform we arrived on, but not the Canadians; we were industrious enough to walk to the other side of the platform and use that machine.  We were also industrious enough to get a day card for the 5 of us (because they are good for groups up to 5) and saved ourselves some money.  Man we’re industrious!!  Anyways, Patrik lead us on a walking tour of the downtown of Berlin.  We see Potsdamer Platz and the newly built Holocaust Memorial; the place where Hitler’s bunker used to be (we only knew about this because Lars told Nicole, Patrik didn’t even mention it and there were no signs anywhere) and over to the Brandenburg Gate.  I was especially happy about this because the only other time I was in Berlin it was being restored, and was covered in scaffolding and tarps, this time I actually got to see it.  Then we wandered down the road to the Reichstag (government building, it might actually be called the Bundestag, I’m not positive).  Then we Canadians and a German named Norbert headed back in the direction of the hotel and went for dinner at a Mexican restaurant there.  And by there, I mean ‘the ghetto’.  

The next day we got up and went for drive around the city on the bus and Patrik gave a bit of a tour as we were driving.  After the bus dropped us off we Canadians headed to the New National Gallery to see the Pablo Picasso exhibit.  I will say that it was pretty cool that I got to see so many Picassos.  I will also say that I now know that I prefer photography as an art to painted art.  I have a theory on why this is, but I won’t get into it here.  Anyways, we then headed over to the Checkpoint Charlie museum and stopped at the former Luftwaffe Ministry.  I wasn’t actually all that interested at the time that we stopped, but I am glad we did because when we went into the Checkpoint Charlie museum they mentioned it a bunch because it was the site of a huge protest in 1953.  The CC museum was pretty cool, but it was really crowded in the parts that were really cool, and there was also a lot of stuff to read and not only did we not have enough time to read it all, but there were too many people.  I think my favourite part was hearing about all the different ways people escaped to the west.  Then we had some lunch and headed back to meet the group because we were scheduled to see a show.  “What show?” you ask?  Why, it was the Blue Man Group, that’s what!

Yup, the Blue Man Group went from Vegas to Berlin and we got tickets to it.  This is all I will say at this time:  it was really good.  I will get into more detail in a different post, possibly tomorrow, but we’ll see.  After the show we did some shopping (it was a special shopping night where all the stores are open until midnight, and I’m not entirely sure why) and a group of us went to have some coffee at a coffee shop called *snicker* Balzac!  That never gets old!  Not when I drive down to Calgary, and not sitting in the shop drinking tea.  Balzac.  Balzac!  Man, that’s funny.  Then we headed back towards the hotel, tried to find a restaurant for 11, gave up and split up.  I ate Indian food with the larger half of the group and thoroughly enjoyed it!

The next day, we ate breakfast and got onto the bus, and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  These two retarded girls had come down to eat breakfast still in their pajamas about 10 minutes before we were scheduled to leave.  And they didn’t look like the were hurrying either!!  So now the bus is full and we are all waiting – half and hour late – on these 2 stupid broads!  So the Canadians split.  Yeah, we couldn’t take it anymore and opted to take the U-Bahn to where we wanted to go, which was back to the last remaining, standing part of the wall.  On the train we ran into 3 people from the University of Lethbridge, which was really funny if you ask me, and we took them with us to the wall (see Nicole’s blog for a link to the website for the little museum-thingy that’s there).  We had wanted to do so much on that day, and really ended up doing very little.  We wanted to go on a boat tour on the river, but weren’t sure where the port was and didn’t know when or how often they leave, so we decided to go to this other thing instead.  I refer to it as “this other thing” because we never actually got there.  We followed the instructions on the brochure that Nicole had and then realized that they were really poor instructions.  We were going to walk the several blocks to where we thought the entrance might be but then we realized that we would have to leave in about an hour and 15 minutes to make it to the bus on time, and they pretty much recommend 2 hours to make it through this museum, so we would have been really rushed, even if we did find it right away, which was pretty unlikely.  So, we were right near this thing that’s referred to as the Gedaechtnis Kirche.  That basically means “memorial church” and the point is that there was this church that was really badly damaged during the bombings in Berlin (I believe that over half of the city was destroyed during the war) and instead of fixing it, they left it as a reminder.  It is both horrible and beautiful at the same time.  It wasn’t open, but we walked around it and there was an open-air market right there, too, so we looked around that.  There was also a KFC and I had that for lunch.  They didn’t have poutine.  I’m not saying that I’m surprised, but I am saying that I was disappointed.  They did, however, have chili-cheese fries, so I ordered those!  Then we rushed back to the bus because we were running really late.  

I think that the only other thing worth mentioning about the trip home was that we stopped at the coolest truck stop ever!  Now, as I briefly mentioned earlier, you sometimes (usually) have to pay to use a public restroom in Germany.  Now, I’ve been to Italy and sometimes there you actually have to pay money and get a receipt to use the facilities, or sometimes they make you pay for the toilet paper; my point is that you have to pay.  In Germany, it’s usually not mandatory (as in, you need a receipt) but there is a woman sitting outside the bathroom next to a plate and if you don’t pay she yells at you.  I’m still undecided as to whether it is required if there is a sign that says how much you should pay, or if it is just a recommended amount.  Anyways, this place actually had turnstiles that you had to put your 50 cents into.  The funny thing is that it gave you a voucher for 50 cents that you could use at any of the vendors in the little complex.  So, basically, if you were buying anything at all (over 50 cents) you were using the crapper for free, if not, then you had to pay 50 cents.  Let me tell you, though, it would have been worth the 50 cents!  These were my favourite toilets!!  They are the kind (some of you have definitely heard me talk about them before) where, after you’re done, the seat rotates and gets disinfected all the way around, so that it’s clean for the next person.  They are brilliant!!  Yes, I do realize how funny it is that the highlight of the trip home was the toilets at the truck stop.

Okay, I have to end this here because it is now 1:09 am.  I have not posted in the pictures that I had planned on, and I won’t tonight.  Depending on how I feel tomorrow, I might add them into this post or just create a new post with the pictures, but there are pictures that I wanted to put, to keep Kellie happy.  Good night everyone!