Who's a Berliner??

Hello guys,
This is my post from my recent Berlin trip and I bet you can’t wait to read it.
So Berlin…
We took off from Aachen by train at about 7:30 on Wednesday a week ago. Since we were going with the ICE (it’s not ice as many Americans thought. It’s “Inter City Express”) train, it only took us about five hours though to get to the east of the nation. The ride was pretty boring and I had a little bit of a sleep.
As we got to Berlin, we directly headed to the hotel, which was more like a youth hostel, and got our rooms. I went in a room with all the other German guys. There were six of us. After putting our stuff in the rooms and getting our sheets on the beds, which was a little hard for some of us, we met with the group, to take a guided bus tour around the city. The guide was totally gay, what made listening to him pretty funny (He really sounded like a fag), but the tour was actually really informative and we even got out of the bus three times. For the Hackische Höfe, a place where there are houses built around little places, with a lot of little shops and cafes. The next stop was at the very famous holocaust memorial in Berlin. It consists of a lot of concrete blocks lined up in rows and it’s very impressive. The last place we stopped at was a weird museum kind of place but I don’t remember exactly what it was for.
In the evening we gathered at a nearby restaurant and had dinner with the whole group. After that we went to the river Spree in a little group (well there were about 10 of us) and just hung around there.
The next day was the best I think. We didn’t have to get up that early and then walked across the Tiergarten, which is sort of Berlin’s Central Park, to the government district, which looks really nice. After that we had lunch at the Paul Löbe Haus, a house where all the advisers of the government work and where people from the parliament can go to gather information. Just after lunch we had a little tour around the Reichstag, which is the main building of German politics hosting the main chamber. To see where politics of the highest level is made, was really exciting. After the tour inside the Reichstag, we went on top of the cupola, from where you have a wonderful view all across Berlin. The last event in the Reichstag was a discussion with a member of the Green Party, which was very interesting although I didn’t quite share most of her ideas. Who the hell supports a speed limit? At least no one in Germany, the land of the free (at least for driving legally at a ridiculous speed). But anyways, after that we shortly went to the Kurfüstendamm, a boulevard mainly for shopping. One of the guys called Jonas and I didn’t stay there very long though, because we had an appointment with a delicious kangaroo stake. Yeah, you got that right. There is an awesome Aussie restaurant inside the Sony Center at the Potsdamer Platz, where they serve Kangaroo and Croc Stake, and VB, Fosters, Crown and some Newcastle beer as drinks. It was just heaven and I think I haven’t felt that much at home in a restaurant for quite some time. They had like paintings and pictures from Australia on the walls. For an hour or so I really felt like back in the day…2007! And take that as a promise: I’ll be back to the red continent someday, hopefully someday soon.
Well at night we went to a youth club which was kind of absurd, because all of us normally go to proper clubs and this one was full of like 12 year old. Nevertheless, Johannes, Immo and I stayed there with the three good German girls of the group and watched them doing crazy stuff like dancing in cages with little guys and stuff. We had a good laugh anyways. Apart from that this night was pretty messy though. Two of the American guys were caught smoking weed in their room the night before and the chaperones were really worried, that they’d do it again, since they’d have to go home the next morning. On top of that some German boys got in fights with the chaperones because having to be at the hotel at midnight really pissed them off. I was sort of relaxed about that since it was only four days. But anyways this fighting continued like the whole night and basically kept me from sleeping. So in the end I had like four to five hours of sleep, which wasn’t quite enough.
The next morning it all cooled down a little (The two guys who had to go home did smoke weed at night again :D ) and we went to Charlottenburg Castle. It is a very old castle and shows quite well how European nobility used to live in the 18th and 19th century. For me it wasn’t that impressive, because there are bigger castles I already saw, but for the Americans, who have never seen something like that, it was quite a good idea, I guess. So in the afternoon, we went to Alexander Platz, where one of Berlin’s main sights, the big TV tower, stands. After lunch we parked the girls at a shopping mall and walked down the big boulevard, Unter den Linden. It is Berlin’s biggest boulevard and hosts a lot of important buildings, like the Berlin dome, the Humbold University or the former palace of the republic, which is a large green at the moment. Since three of the six German guys were sick of walking, we left them at the green, because I wanted to see the Gendarmenmarkt, a place in Berlin with two similar looking domes facing each other. That was quite a cool spot. Later, after we met with the girls again, two of us went home and the others, including me, went to the Hackische Höfe again, to grab a coffee. In the evening we went back to the hotel to had dinner and at night, after some pregame at the room, we went to a bar in town. Unfortunately, we confused the Oranienburgerstaße with the Oranienstraße. So in the end, we didn’t end up in the street with all the awesome music lounges, but in a street with some bars (not bad ones actually) and some hookers, which was kind of funny actually, because one of them was complaining about the fact that there were too many young guys and she was more of an older model. At 12 we were back at the hotel and basically went straight to bed (at like 2 in the morning).
The last day we went to Checkpoint Charlie, a place where there was a gate in the Berlin Wall and nowadays there is a museum for the wall. After a self-guided tour around the museum we had a little talk with a guy who helped people to escape from the DDR and that was very interesting, I thought.
After having lunch, it was time for us to go take our bags and head to the train station to go home.

After having explained what I did, I want to talk about Berlin in general and I want to compare it to New York in parts. Berlin is of course not as huge as Berlin, what relates to the amount of people living there as well as to the heights of the buildings. In Berlin most buildings are about 10 stories high and those are like the huge ones already. In general Berlin seems to be much more spread. Places are larger, streets wider and what you directly recognize is that Berlin feels a lot slower. It’s more like the relaxed metropolis unlike the busy, in rush metropolis, NYC is. I think Berlin is very cool, especially for Germans because you find German history everywhere you go. Whether it is street names or houses. In the end it is hard to compare both Berlin and NYC. New York had a larger impact on me though. It was more overwhelming, more fascinating. Berlin is more of a quiet beauty, although it wasn’t quiet at all, at least not at our place, because we had a train just going past our front window every five minutes during the night.

So that was it from Berlin. I’m working now until we go to La Palma in about a week and I’m already very excited about that. I hope you are all doing well. I am apparently and yeah I think I forgot to mention, that I have new glasses since yesterday. Black is the color now and I think they look pretty awesome. You’ll be able to have a look at them in a week, when the first photos from the Canary Islands hit the net.
See ya later folks

Your Dan

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