Brussels: Day 2

Kim and I really needed to sleep in, so we decided today we'd sleep in and then see Brussels. We left the hostel at 11:30 (GO US!! SLEEPING IN!!) and wandered around the city. Turns out my first impression was pretty good - its ugly with not that much to do.

We did manage to have a truly Belgian experience:




Also, in most countries you get a fine or arrested for peeing in public - especially peeing on a church! Belgium has, however, embraced the peeing-in-public culture (unrelated to the little peeing boy statue) and installed urinals on the church wall:




After that we went to a parking structure where our map told us there was a great view of the city. Here was the view:




UGLY, right?!

Brussels

There is really not that much to do in Brussels. We got here at 3-something on Wednesday, and after checking into our hostel and relaxing a little bit we went out again to explore. We saw some pretty buildings, but in general Brussels is rough and ugly :( That's mostly what people told us, but we wanted to come anyway.

The most famous landmark in Brussels, which is on all the postcards and souvenir things, is this statue. It is, in fact, a little boy peeing into a fountain:



After doing some touristing, we decided we needed some Belgian beer. Here the Trappist monks brew beer that is very famous and all that. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer

This is what we ordered:



And they tasted like beer. Terrible, terrible beer. Kim said her tasted like dirt mixed with ash, so we decided beer was actually just liquid Pompeii.

We also had good beers, which were peach and raspberry flavored. This bar had a Lambic brewed specifically for them, Lambic Blanche, and I wanted some but they didn't have any! They were out! How rude.

We went home after beer and I got to talk to Drex, which was nice cause we hadn't talked in a while <3

Amsterdam: Day 2

Day 2 we frantically tried to fit in everything we hadn't already done. First we went to a market that we read was cheap - but it turned out to be pretty boring. We left and hit up the Heineken factory. We didn't pay to do the tour, but we went to the gift shop where you can buy a bottle with your name on it. I considered getting some for the beer-drinking men in my life, but the cost to ship it home would have been insane.

Then we went to the Van Gogh museum, because he's Dutch and super famous. There were a lot of well-known works, including: The Potato Eaters (aka The Momo Chas), Sunflowers, his most famous self-portrait as well as a handful of less famous self-portraits, and paintings by people inspired him and people who he inspired. Starry Night wasn't there, though, that painting is in NY.

After Van Gogh we went to the flower market, which we thought would be cut tulips and other flowers, but it turned out to be bulbs and seeds. After a quick lunch, we went to the Anne Frank House.

We got super lucky because there was only a (relatively) short line. At the house you can tour the actual annex the family lived in, which was very interesting but also pretty heavy. If you don't know the story of Anne Frank, Wikipedia it.

To lighten the mood, we decided to PUB CRAWL!!!

The crawl was awesome, but all the photos are on Kim's camera. We went to 6 bars, and at each bar we got a free drink. Not mixed drinks,mostly beer, although some places gave us wine or a tequila shot. Also, the pub crawl workers squirted some vodka-drink directly into our mouths as we entered each bar. It was classy, lemme tell ya.

After getting home at 3:30, we were definitely looking forward to checking out by 10am and moving on to Brussels....NOT.

Amsterdam: Day 1

Our first full day in Amsterdam we went back to the flea market we thought was on Sunday, because it was conveniently on Monday. Kim bought some stuff, but I didn't see anything I liked. After that we wandered around some more shops, and headed over to a FREE TOUR! Some major cities have students or young graduates doing tours for tips-only, and to advertise the other tours, the ones that cost money. We had never done an organized tour before, because usually we prefer to see just the things that interest us, but we figured we'd try it and it was actually really good.

The tour lasted THREE HOURS (I wasn't expecting that at all) and took us all over - through the red light district, showed us the Jewish neighborhood, the shopping district, historical sights, etc. etc. The tour guide was great and really enthusiastic, and had tons of insight and stories. He even gave us discount tickets to a pub crawl put on by a partner company.....more on that to come :D

Notable sights:



This is the Jewish district? Notice that it looks like it was designed by college students on acid in the 1960s? IT WAS! During the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945, when the Nazis cut off the supplies to Amsterdam, 18,000 died of hunger. The city cut down all of their trees to burn for fuel, which is why none of the trees in the city are older than 65 years old. After they ran out of trees, they went into the Jewish district, which was empty because all of the Jews had been shipped out by the Nazis. They used the furniture for fuel, but after they ran out of that they started using the support beams for fuel. Of course, the buildings fell down. For a while, the city couldn't afford to fix it, but in the 1960s they got the architecture students to fix it up. This is what happened.



That is the old headquarters for the Dutch East India Trading Company. If you took AP US History you've probably heard of it. Probably the first modern corporation.



That is the narrowest house in Amsterdam. It's not a museum, someone lives in it, and he's taller than the house is wide. Houses used to be taxed on width, since merchants had to live on a canal and everyone wanted to be a merchant. Whoever built this house obviously knew how to minimize his tax bill.

After the tour, we tried to go to the Anne Frank House but the line was too long. Instead, we ate Dutch apple pie and wandered the Red Light District. Not at the same time.

26 Hours of Travel? Okay...

On Saturday, we got up at 8am like we hadn't been dancing and drinking all night. Without any delays or mistakes, we:

-Caught the bus from Kristiina's apartment to the Uppsala train station
-Caught the train from Uppsala to Stockholm
-Caught the train from Stockholm to Malmö
-Caught the train from Malmö to Copenhagen

After a lovely day of running between and sleeping on trains, we caught the 16-hour train from Copenhagen to Amsterdam. Luckily, it was a sleeper train, so we had reserved beds and did not, in fact, have to sit up for 16 hours.

Our train was a few hours late, maybe 3, getting to Amsterdam, but that was fine - we've been in much worse train delays.

We successfully found the hostel when we arrived in Amsterdam, but it was too far from the city center for walking (1 train stop away). We desperately wanted to shower (we felt like we slept on a train!) but we couldn't check in for a few more hours, so we dragged our filthy selves back downtown to go to flea market our travel books said was on Sundays. Turns out its NOT on Sundays, but we got some exploring in anyway.

Hostel review:
We stayed at StayOkay, which had a chain of 3 hostels in Amsterdam. It was huge, with tons of rooms. Ours had 6 beds an a bathroom en-suite. Kim and I quickly claimed the upstairs loft, which had metal blinds that gave us some privacy and sheltered us from early-morning sunshine. Breakfast was great and filling, with a large selection. Everything was clean and all the other stuff you want in a hostel...the only downside was that internet cost money (3 euro/hour) and it wasn't in the city center, so we had to take trams or the train into town - it was only 10 or 15 minutes away, but its still nicer to be able to walk. On Tuesday we had to take a cab because trams stop running before 1am.

Stockholm: Day 3

Friday was our last day in Stockholm, so we got up early to check out and stash our bags at the train station. By 10:30 we were on a tour of City Hall.

The Blue Hall in Stockholm's City Hall is where the Nobel prize banquet is held every December 10. 1,300 people are seated in this room:




It's called the Blue Hall because it was supposed to be blue, but once the architect saw the pretty brickwork, he didn't want to cover it up with blue. He apparently also didn't want to change the name of the room.

After that we walked over to the Palace, where we looked at the treasury and then wandered around the streets, shopping some more, until it was time to catch our train to Uppsala! Kristiina, who we had met at the hostel in Prague, lives in Uppsala and offered to have us stay with her for a night and go to a student club there. So, we went!

It was great to see some of the girls we met in Prague, although they couldn't all be there. We met some new people, and danced until late'o'clock. :D

Stockholm: Day 2

Our second day in Stockholm we went to see the Vasa.

Brief history of the Vasa, not taken from Wikipedia because I am writing this on a train and have no internet:

In the mid-1600s Poland and Sweden were having a war. The Polish king technically had the rights to the Swedish throne, and he want to exercise those rights and take the throne from the Swedish king. The Swedish king decided to go down to Poland and teach the Polish king a thing or two. So, he ordered a new navy ship built – a giant ship that would be the pride of the navy and help Sweden to beat Poland once and for all. So, the Vasa was built.

On the Vasa's maiden voyage in 1628, she sailed out of the harbor in Stockholm with only part of her crew, on her way to the archipelago to pick up the rest. Because everyone was out to see the maiden voyage, all of her gun ports were open so she could look as intimidating and powerful as possible. When she was not far offshore, a gust of wind took her sails and the crew had to struggle to get her standing upright again. Shortly thereafter a second gust of wind hit her, and the crew couldn't put her upright again before water started gushing in through her open gunports, and the Vasa sank.

Over time, the Vasa settled into the mud and silt outside the harbor, and people forgot where she was. In the 1950s, she was found again! If she had sank in saltwater the ship would have been very decayed by now, but the water off the coast of Stockholm was brackish, and she was also settled into the mud. She was preserved in amazing condition – although her paint has obviously been washed away, the rest of the ship is preserved.

The Vasa gets her own museum, and is stored in the largest air conditioning unit in the world. Crews of scientists work on preserving her, and she is currently being measured so a to-scale model can be created, because she's falling apart. They estimate that in 50 years, she will have fallen apart completely.


Google image: http://www.hnsa.org/ships/img/vasa1.jpg

After the Vasa, we wandered around the island that the Vasa Mueum is on. Kim wanted to see some elk, so we headed over to the part of the island with trees and possibly elk. We didn't see any, unfortunately, but it was pretty!



After that we shopped some more, and then met our friend Kristiina for dinner. We had met Kristiina in Prague, and she lives in Uppsala but was in Stockholm for the day, so we had dinner and PEAR CIDER!! Kim and I have been missing cider, since most countries don't really have it, but apparently Sweden likes us.

After dinner, we tried to meet up with some people from the hostel, but we couldn't find them! So, we ended up going back to the hostel and falling asleep ASAP.

Stockholm: Day 1

After our half-week with Unn, Kim and I headed to Stockholm. While we were in Sweden, we figured it was worth seeing. We arrived Wednesday afternoon, and headed straight to our hostel, which was only 1 metro stop away from the main train station. Kim and I grabbed maps and went to go study them over Thai food. Our cashew chicken and cashew beef turned out to be really satisfying, partly because we've been craving nuts (but they're so expensive in grocery stores!) and party because it wasn't Italian food! Everywhere we go Italian food is the cheapest, so we've eaten a lot of that.

We walked to city hall, because it was on our way from the neighborhood our hostel was in to the center of town and because I wanted to take a tour. It was too late for tours, but we looked at the building and got information on when tours were happening.




After that, we walked over to Old Town to see the castle. We were on our way, with the castle in view, when we were distracted by a street, across the bridge, FILLED with people. If that many people were interested in something, we DEFINITELY were, so we went that way instead.

Turns out we had discovered the shopping street! It was filled with little gift shops and souvenir stores and, of course, H&Ms. Kim and I wandered the stores, and after a while decided we needed to....GO TO THE ICE BAR. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Stockholm has a bar made entirely out of ice. The bar itself, the walls, the glasses – everything. The whole bar was being maintained at a -5°C. Being the educated Californian that I am, I went in wearing my shorts. Big mistake.....ice is COLD!!!

The glasses:


Me!:




Hostel Review;
Lodge 32 was one of the best in my opinion, although it was one of the more expensive (about $30/night....yes, that's expensive for hostels). It was located only 1 metro stop from the main train station, and then about 20 meters from the metro stop. It was below street level, which was great for a couple reasons.
1) It was cool. When you pack tons of people into a room, especially in the summer, it gets HOT. Lots of our hostels have been terribly hot, and you just end up with a room full of uncomfortable, grumpy people in their underwear and lines for the showers. It was partly because Stockholm wasn't too hot, but also partly because we weren't on the sixth or seventh floor of a building, that the temperature in the room was comfortable – I almost considered sleeping under a comforter!
2) The light didn't shine into our room at 4am. In Northern Europe, ESPECIALLY Sweden because it is so far north, the sun sets really late and rises really early. When I'm trying to sleep, it's not so nice!


Kim and I had reserved beds in a 12-person coed dorm, but they were full so instead we got beds in a 4-person coed dorm for the same price. Awesome! The hostel didn't have very many showers or toilets (3 showers and 5 toilets for about 8 rooms of people....) but it was never a problem for us. Also, there was a common room with free wifi and free use of internet on their computers! Finally, there was a kitchen that we could use, which was nice even though it only had refrigerators and microwaves. It had free coffee and tea supplies as well.

Cons were:
-You're not allowed to drink alcohol in the hostel, although our roommates did in our room so clearly that's not really enforced. Espeically since:
-The staff leave at 6pm and there is only an emergency phone number. There's nobody to talk to if you want dinner restaurant recommendations, or help reading your metro schedule, or anything like that.
-Few bathrooms
-Breakfast not included, and too expensive to be worth paying for

But, all in all, its benefits far outweighed the drawbacks :D

Unn's Vacation House

On Monday morning, Kim decided to brave the BMW once again and take us to Unn's vacation house! Her house was 2 hours north, past the town where the author of Pippi Longstocking grew up. The house was on the edge of a lake, which was beautiful and relaxing.

Unn's mom and mom's boyfriend were already at the house, so we met them and then swiftly directed our attention to the next matter of business: food! To continue with our introduction to Swedish culture, we decided to have Swedish pancakes with more lingonberry jam. But, we were out of eggs! So we went off to get eggs. By “get eggs,” I don't mean we got them from the supermarket- I mean we stole them from under unsuspecting chicken butts!




And, after Unn cooked for us, we enjoyed our sugary lunch:




After lunch, Unn's mom Marie and boyfriend volunteered to take us mushroom and blueberry-picking. Apparently these weird-looking mushrooms are expensive and hard to find, unless you know where to look. Even with Marie's expertise, though, we didn't find many:



Later, for dinner, these little mushrooms became the starter course:




Next up was blueberry picking, which was much more (hehe) fruitful:




Guess what THESE became that evening?



At dinner, Unn and Marie took the opportunity to teach us a little MORE about Swedish culture. We sat down to 2 pieces of salted/pickled herring and a shot of Schnapps, both of which are enjoyed at traditional Swedish celebrations and holidays. In addition, they sang a song Swedes sing on holidays -something about frogs? It came complete with hand gestures.






Kim and I were quite confused.




Before leaving the next day, I took some photos of the property.

Swimming area:


View of the house from the dock:


Neighbor's horses:

Sigrid's Vacation House

On Friday, Kim drove Sigrid, Unn and I to Sigrid's vacation house in southern Sweden on the Baltic Sea. Kim was nervous to drive Unn's father's BMW in Sweden, but Unn was very helpful in translating Swedish road signs so Kim quickly overcame her nervousness



The backseat passengers also felt safe




Once at Sigrid's house, we were immediately ordered to put on bikinis and enjoy the sunshine! Sigrid's father took us out on his motorboat, and we got to swim in the sea. Those photos are on Kim's camera, but here's a photo of the bay – the view of Sigrid's family's house.




After boating and swimming, we helped make dinner – we got the exciting job of digging potatoes out of the garden! The Swedes enjoyed teaching Americans that food does, in fact, come from the ground. Being American, we were appropriately surprised to learn that food does is not spontaneously created in a deep fryer.






After dinner we sat around enjoying the daylight, since it gets dark at like 10 or 10:30, and trying to choke down some gross Swedish beer. Seeing our suffering, Sigrid made us gin and juice instead – we thought it was pretty ironic that we were from California but never had gin and juice until we got to Sweden. (Katie Perry reference, anyone?) Also, with all the potatoes, and then the gin, it made me miss Momo!

The next day Kim and I got up and wandered aimlessly around the house, until we were once again ordered to put on bikinis. We sat out by the water, and I was a rebel and attempted to tan but only ended up with a mild sunburn. Which for me is the same thing as a tan so its okay!

For lunch, Kim and I demanded Swedish meatballs, which Unn cooked for us.

My Swedish experience was really completed by eating lingonberries and meatballs with a blonde Swedish girl in a bikini

Copenhagen

We had one day in Copenhagen: the plan was to arrive by 9 or 9:30am, after our overnight train, check into our HUGE hostel, then see the city in one day. Because our train as horribly delayed (see previous entry), we didn't actually arrive until about 2 or 3pm. :(

We checked into our hostel, and headed back out into the city.

On our way to the Skagen store, we passed by the Copenhagen KPMG!! This was exciting for me because all the cities we've been in have PwCs and E&Ys and Deloittes everywhere but I had never seen a KPMG! Yay!



We stopped by the Skagen store, but it was even more expensive than in the US, so our dreams of buying cheap Skagen watches were destroyed mercilessly. Next we went to Christiania, which is a hippie commune in Copenhagen. It was a very strange experience...

According to Wikipedia, "Christiania serves as a haven for people with certain alternative lifestyles, and was founded in 1971 when the hippies took over an abandoned military zone. The Danish authorities have many times over the years done more or less serious attempts to shut Christiania, without success."

Everyone was wandering around in hippiesque clothes, buying knickknacks from street vendors or food from street vendors/tents or cafes. The strangest part was that there were street vendors selling drugs - with literally all the goods laid out on the table! It's illegal to sell drugs in Copenhagen...but for some reason people in Christiania don't get arrested!

There are no photos of Christiania, because they ask that people don't take photos.

Next up we went to see the little mermaid statue. Since Hans Christian Anderson was from Copenhagen, and he wrote The Little Mermaid, there is a small statue of a mermaid sitting off the coast of Copenhagen. Kim really wanted to see it, since she has an old photo of her grandma with the statue during her grandma's travels around Denmark. The statue is a famous Copenhagen icon and a popular tourist attraction, but this particular year its IN SHANGHAI. For the 6 months of World Expo 2010 its in the Danish pavilion in Shanghai. Silly us, Kim and I didn't think to ask Denmark if their world-famous icon was IN THE COUNTRY.

Instead there was just a screen where we could watch the little mermaid, hanging out in Shanghai:


After that misadventure, we went back to the hostel and sat around in the common room, where we met some other people from CA! There was a UC study abroad trip in our hostel, so we talked to them and a random girl from Australia.

Hostel Review:
Danhostel Copenhagen City was HUGE, with 1020 beds. It looked like a giant office building - we were on the 17th floor. We ended up getting our own room, not because we paid more but because we got lucky. Breakfast was crazy expensive, like $15 each or something, so we skipped it. Sheets had to be rented, but that was fine because we had travel sheets. Overall a good hostel, even though it was expensive and the breakfast, sheets and internet was ALSO expensive. (Internet = 5 euro an hour). It was very close to the train station, walking distance to that and everything else.

Train to Copenhagen

Tuesday night was our first time on a night train. We got a ticket from Berlin to Malmö, and we planned to catch another train from Malmö to Copenhagen. Our train left Berlin at 11pm and was supposed to arrive at 8:30am.

Kim and I had "couchettes," which are like bunk beds but there are 3 on top of each other instead of 2. Like this:


We had reserved the 2 bottom bunks, so we didn't have to do any climbing. When we got to our car, there was already a family of 3 there - our roommates for the night! There was a mother & 2 kids, probably about 7 and 9. The mother asked if one of us would switch beds with her because she couldn't climb the ladder- Kim agreed to. Then the mother said okay: her & her daughter would have the bottom bunks, Kim and I would have the middle bunks, and her son would have a top bunk. Kim and I corrected her - since we had reserved both bottom bunks, and only given her one, we got one bottom bunk and one middle bunk. Because of the confusion, we showed each other our reservation papers - and we had BOTH reserved the same bed! This wasn't going to work, especially if more people came to our compartment, so I went to grab a conductor. When he got to our compartment, he looked at my reservation papers and told me I was fine, then had a conversation with the woman in German, and she packed up and left!

For a glorious 5 minutes Kim and I had the compartment to ourselves. And then our roommates showed up. Four Italian eighteen-year-olds were to be sleeping above us, who immediately stripped down to their boxers and -thankfully- jumped into bed. We'd heard horror stories of overnight train-roommates who stay up all night talking and drinking, and we were relieved to find that they were not that type of roommate.

I slept pretty well for the cramped compartments, because the motion of the train lulled me to sleep, like it does on all other train rides. There was no stopping at stations, since it was a night train it only picks people up then drops them off at the end. However, the train did randomly stop a couple of times and sit on the tracks for a few minutes, which isn't unusual but did wake me up each time. One time I woke up and the train was stationary, so I tried to get back to sleep. After an hour of dozing but not really sleeping, I realized that the train was STILL stationary.

I went out into the hallway and looked out the window, and we were in what looked like a station, because there were rows and rows of tracks all next to each other, but there were no signs saying where we were. The train doors were open, and although most people were still in their compartments, some were outside the train hanging out on the platform. I went back to report my findings to Kim, and while we were wondering what was going on we heard a loudspeaker announcement from the train conductor. He introduced the message by saying he was going to say it in German, English and Swedish. We listened to the German first, and picked out the words "police" and "helicopter" and possibly "fire." The English announcement never came - just silence between the German and the Swedish!

I went to find somebody to ask, and a British man told me that from what he gathered:
1) We'd been stopped for 3 hours
2) There had been some sort of police work on the tracks
3) We were going to take a ferry to Sweden

I thought this meant that we should be prepared to pack up and get off the train, since we'd be taking a ferry instead. This was frustrating because it was already almost 8am and we didn't even know what country we were in. There was no way we'd get to Malmo by 8:30am. Kim and I waited for something to happen, and eventually the train started to move very, very slowly until we were in what looked like a tunnel.

An announcement came on, including the promised English, and it said something along the lines of, "sorry for the delay, we would like to treat you to a free breakfast on deck 7." Slowly Kim and I realized that the entire TRAIN was on the ferry (they can do that!?) and drowned our misery in tons and tons of free food.



After further discussion, we gathered that the ferry ride would take 3 hours and 45 minutes, so we would be at least 4 hours late getting to Malmo, and that the train was supposed to catch a substantially earlier ferry, around 3am, but it missed the ferry because it was delayed due to German policework on the tracks.

During breakfast, a train employee came over to talk to us about our plans - had we missed any connections? Did we need them to work out new reservations for new trains since we'd missed other ones? We told him we were headed to Malmo - AND HE SAID THE TRAIN DIDN'T GO TO MALMO. This was surprising to us, since:
1) We had asked in Berlin for tickets to Malmo
2) They had sold us tickets to Malmo
3) Our ticket said "Malmo" on it
4) The departures board at the train station had listed our train as going to Malmo
5) The platform in Berlin had announced the train as Malmo

The train employee kindly informed us that Malmo was closed due to construction, and that we should get off in Lund, and from there take a train to Copenhagen.

After eating, we headed back down to our train-on-a-ferry to sleep some more. Soon enough, our Italian roommates were back and for some reason singing "Hey Jude" repeatedly. We arrived in Lund and successfully departed to Copenhagen immediately!

Berlin: Part 3

Our third and last day in Berlin was Tuesday. We had to check out of our hostel by 10am, and our night train to Sweden wasn't until 11pm, so we had a whole day to wreak havoc on Berlin. First we headed back to Brandenburg Gate, to see it when it wasn't dusk and hopefully get a better photo, as well as to see a neighboring building I wanted to see.

Here is a photo of the gate during the day:




Oh, I'm sorry. Is the view of the gate obscured by a giant tent? That's because there was an all-day party celebrating the French independence day right in front of Brandenburg Gate! Humph.

We stopped by DZ Bank on the square facing the gate, because the interior of the bank was designed by Frank Gehry, the same guy that designed the Dancing Building in Prague, and LA's Walt Disney Music Hall, among other buildings. The lobby of the bank is supposed to make you feel like you're both inside and outside of a fish. Well, what do you think?:



After that, we went to the Pergamon Museum, which Kim had heard a lot about in Art History, so we had to go! It features tons of ancient Greek, Mesopotamian and Persian treasures, including ENTIRE TEMPLES AND GATES. I'm not even joking, they just picked up chunks of ancient Greece and dropped them in downtown Berlin.

Here is the Pergamon Altar, a 2nd century BC Greek temple:



After we saw everything in the museum, we got some food and decided to wander the Tiergarten, Berlin's giant public gardens.




After we got bored of that, we went to the French Independence Day celebration (the one blocking our view of the Gate) and enjoyed their free music.

French hipster band:




Since we had our 11pm train to catch, Kim and I grabbed some dinner at a supermarket and ate it on the platform, because we're classy,

Berlin: Part 2

The second day in Berlin, Kim and I woke up and took a cold shower!! The staff had “fixed” the water temperature, and by that I mean it was cold instead of hot Luckily this is exactly what we wanted, especially after sleeping in 100 degree room with 8 other people, so we were happy.

Since it wasn't as unbearably hot as the day before (yet), we decided to take advantage of the manageable temperature and head to the East Side Gallery. This is a section of the Berlin Wall that has since been covered in murals symbolizing freedom, and is the longest outdoor gallery in the world, about a mile long. Perhaps you'll recognize its most famous mural, The Kiss:



After walking the entire gallery, Kim and I grabbed an S-bahn to the Jewish Museum. The Jewish Museum has enough exhibits and activities to last an entire trip to Berlin, it was ridiculous. The building itself was very interesting and symbolic, and there were plaques throughout the museum explaining its symbolism. On top of that there is floor after floor of museum exhibits covering not just the Holocaust, but the entire history of Judaism and modern-day Judaism. A lot of the exhibits were interactive, which was nice because walking through museums just reading plaques and looking at artifacts can get tiring (although they have that, too). Kim and I spent a good chunk of the day there, but eventually we needed food so we dragged ourselves out of the air conditioning and found some nourishment.

After refueling, we headed over to Checkpoint Charlie, everyones favorite gateway into East Berlin. There were actually 3 checkpoints, Checkpoint A, B and C, but Checkpoint C(harlie) was the most famous because it's where the American tourists would pass through.





We went into the Checkpoint Charlie museum, which detailed the myriad ways people escaped from East Berlin, by going over, under or around the wall. They had some cars or other things people used to hide in to get past the checkpoint guards, which were interesting to see. There was a TON of information in the museum, and I would have liked to see/read more than I did, but it was too hot to stay long. Most of the museum is on the second floor of the building, and it was packed with people. It was 100 degrees outside, and packed with people, few open windows and even fewer fans it was sweltering, so we eventually gave up and left :(

Next up we went somewhere that we KNEW would be air conditioned – a chocolate store! Good ol' Rick Steves had recommended Fassbender & Rausch, Europe's largest chocolate store. They sell 250 different kinds of truffle and candy on a 55-food long buffet, so we stopped by and, because we didn't want to be RUDE, we bought a couple truffles each- you know, just to be polite.



Post-chocolate consumption, we headed over to the Potsamer Plaza theatre, because they were advertising a live production of Dirty Dancing and I had to at least TRY to see it.



I asked about tickets for that night's show, and they had some! And then I bought them!




The show was fantastic. The dialogue was entirely in German, which wasn't too surprising considering we were in Germany. Because I <3 Dirty Dancing I already knew what was going on in almost every scene, but poor Kim isn't as well-versed in Swazie and had a harder time following it :( At the intermission I translated the first half for her, and told her what would happen in the second, but at least she could still enjoy the dancing :D Unfortunately, the male lead wasn't anywhere near as hot as Patrick Swazie circa 1987, but the female lead did look a lot like Jennifer Gray. The whole thing was fantastic, and you should fly to Berlin and see it right now.

Berlin: Part 1

I am sorry I have not provided you with a decent update lately, my loyal blog-readers and occasional blog-skimmers. I am currently on a train from Copenhagen to Växjö. After finding that the Swedish train has outlets, I plugged in my poor little broken, hungry netbook and will tell you about Berlin!

Berlin was never really high on my list of cities to see in Europe, and few “best of” or “must see” books insist travellers stop by. I am glad we went though – it was an interesting city that appears to be composed almost entirely of museums, Holocaust Memorials, and an amazing S-Bahn/U-Bahn system.

For those of you new to European public transit, U-bahns (in German speaking countries) or U-trains, are city metros, like the underground Muni. It connects almost all major downtown attractions, and the lines stop every 3 or 4 blocks. S-bahns, or S-trains, connect the city to the suburbs, and although they have downtown stops they stop less often so they are faster, and often nicer, than U-bahns. In every major city we've been to, bus tickets are the same as U-Bahn tickets are the same as S-bahn tickets, so we usually buy a pass for a day or 3 days or however long we plan to be there, and ride the U-bahns everywhere, with occasional bus and S-bahn adventures.

Anyway, Berlin had a fantastic S/U-bahn system, and we used it every day to get everywhere – this was especially nice since Germany was going through an awful heat wave it and it was 100+ degrees every day, and we wanted to keep our walking across town to a minimum.

The first day in Berlin, we planned to leave Nick's house early, get to Berlin early, stash our bags at the train station, and catch another train to neighboring Potsdam because we wanted to see the castle there. Kim's guidebook warned that the castle only sells a certain number of entrance tickets per day, so we should get there by 2:30 at the latest to be sure we got in. Unfortunately, we both had colds and Kim and I decided before going to bed Saturday that we would rather sleep in and take our time getting to Berlin, instead of rushing to get to Potsdam by 2:30. It was probably lucky that we decided not to get up early, because trains to Berlin were delayed anyway, because of construction on the tracks, and our train was almost an hour late.

Once in Berlin, we caught a bus to our hostel, which was surprisingly close and with a convenient U-bahn station outside! We checked in, studied some maps, and took off for some sightseeing! The first and most important sight was lunch, followed by wandering about downtown. We found Hitler's bunker, or rather where Hitler's bunker used to be – it is now a parking lot for an apartment complex:




The bunker is not open to the public, and is in fact sealed off and not marked by anything but a small billboard with a brief history of its uses and a diagram. There is no fanfare about the bunker because the German government wants to discourage neonazis from having cult meetings or something. Good goal, if you ask me.


Second sight was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It was a chunk of land, about the size of a small park, covered in giant concrete rectangles (rectangular prisms?). They all look about the same height from the street, but what you don't realize is that the floor dips. As you wander through the memorial the blocks seem to get taller and taller, until they are 10 feet tall in every direction. The blocks are in a grid pattern, so it is easy to find your way out again, but it is still very eerie.






Afterwards, we went into the museum under the memorial. There were 2 major reasons for this decision: a) it was free b) it was air conditioned. They had a timeline of Holocaust events, and various personal narratives and accounts, about which I won't go into detail.

After that, we headed over the Brandenburg Gate, one of the most famous landmarks in Berlin.




After seeing the gate, we briefly considered watching the World Cup, but since Germany wasn't in it, we didn't bother. Instead, we went back to our hostel for our much-anticipated shower. After wrestling with our frame packs in 100 degree heat that morning, and walking around Berlin landmarks in 100 degree heat that afternoon, all we wanted to do was stand under some cold running water. We grabbed our toiletries and headed to the two showers on our floor to find that the showers didn't allow us to control the temperature – instead, there was just a single push-button, that would give us water for about 30 seconds, then it would need to be pushed again – like those annoying sinks in public restrooms. We figured we'd settle for warm showers with this pre-set temperature control, but what we didn't expect was that THE TEMPERATURE WOULD BE STUCK ON SCALDING HOT. We took the most painful and least refreshing showers of our lives, and were just as disgusting after as we were before. We complained at the front desk, and the receptionist said she knew, but couldn't do anything about it until tomorrow. ! Severely disappointing.

Hostel review:
Mittes Backpacker Hostel was located very close to the train station, just 1 or 2 stops by bus, and next to a U-bahn station that was 1 stop to Friedrichstrasse, which is a giant U-bahn/S-bahn hub from which we got anywhere we wanted to go. So, the location was really ieal. The wifi was free, which is always good, but it was broken one night – although that is extremely common in hostels, so I can't fault them too much. The rooms were way too hot, which is mostly because Berlin was having a heat wave, but also partly the hostel's fault since the windows could only open a crack. Also, no breakfast included, which is always disappointing. The most disappointing thing was the shower, which was fixed by the next morning. But, for the location and the cheap price (only like 15 euro a night, if I remember correctly, which is about as cheap as they get) I'd stay there again.