Travel Break One: Berlin

Leaving the airport after landing from Norway and realizing I was going to be standing in the same terminal again in less than seven hours was one of the most depressing facts that I have encountered since being here.  I got back to my kollegium where I'm staying in Copenhagen around midnight and my flight from Berlin left the ground at 8:30 the following morning.  I figured I'd get back to my room, quickly unpack and re-pack and fall asleep ASAP.  Not quite.

A quick run-down of my minor (major) panic attack upon touching down in Copenhagen:

I was traveling to Berlin with a girl who I live with and one of my best friends here, Sasha.  She was already in Germany visiting a family she knows, so the plan was that I would meet her in Berlin.  Pretty good plan, right? Wrong.  We never solidified where exactly we were going to meet or when either of us were arriving in Berlin and where.  I figured I'd land after Norway and turn on my phone to a bunch of texts from her about this logistical information.  Wrong again.  I later found out that the reason we couldn't connect with each other was because her international phone had plugged in my number wrong.  But I didn't figure that out until the next morning.  So after freaking out about this for a few hours, I decided I'd just fly into Berlin and hope to find her / hear from her after I got there.  Luckily, I woke up to a message from her the next morning and we met at the train station and ended up finding each other no problem.  But still.  Traumatizing stuff.

The next morning I made it to the airport, flew to Berlin and asked how to get to the train station where Sasha was arriving.  The lady at the information center said to take a train which was another obstacle altogether.  There were ticket machines at the station, so I waited patiently in a long line to try to get my train ticket.  There was a slot for debit cards so I figured this meant they accepted cards.  How foolish of me.  So then I found an ATM, got out some euros and tried again.  Turns out the bill the ATM had given me was too large.  So then I went to a random vendor and asked him for change.  Said he couldn't do that, but that there was a ticket counter upstairs that could probably break up.  Of course.  So I went up there, asked them to break it and the lady said it was too big (it was a 50 euro bill) but that she could just get me a ticket with my card.  Of course.  I guess no one said international traveling was easy.

The beautiful train station that I spent so long trying to get a ticket for.

After finally connecting with Sasha in Berlin, we met up with a friend of a friend whose place we were crashing at.  We were both pretty wiped from traveling that night so we didn't really do much and instead planned on doing Berlin in a day the next day instead.

So the next morning we woke up, googled what to do and see in Berlin and spent the day being the ultimate tourists.  Our first stop was the East Side Gallery, a section of the Berlin Wall that is completely covered in graffiti.

East Side Gallery

It started raining on us pretty hard, so we decided to dry off a little during a metro ride to Berlin's old Olympic Stadium.  Unfortunately, we couldn't go inside because there was a soccer match there later that day, but we walked around the outside for a bit which was pretty cool.

The rain had let up a little by this point, so we decided to go back to the center of the city and wander for a little.  We saw some more sections of the Berlin Wall, stumbled upon the Holocaust Memorial and saw other monuments (they seem to be everywhere you turn in Europe).  There were also some really gorgeous gardens that we came across in the middle of a fair that was being held.

Sasha with more sections of the Berlin Wall

Holocaust Memorial - very abstract memorial designed with "stelae" of different sizes and heights to symbolize the confusion of the Holocaust

Brandenburg Gate - built in the 18th century as a symbol of peace

Beautiful pond / gardens we happened to come across

That night was our second and final night in Berlin, so we decided to go out and see the city at night.  Somehow Sasha and I got into the most exclusive club in all of Berlin and supposedly the third most exclusive club in all of Europe.  The bouncer must've blinked or something when we got up to him.  Anyway, it was a lot of fun but people in Berlin don't understand the concept of sleeping.  We went to sleep around 7 am because people stay up so late there and woke up at 7:30 am for our flight.  After a 40 minute flight and an hour bus ride back to our kollegium, we were home and had successfully completed and survived our first week of traveling.