I'm a Jelly Donut!

Why hello there!  I have had an exciting weekend, lemme tell you!  This is gonna be a very VERY long post, and there are too many pictures to put here so I'm going to make a separate post just for the ones I can't fit.  Oh, and this took me five hours to write so you better like it gosh darn it.

So I went to Berlin.  Alone.  Because I am either crazy or brave.  But then again, is there really a difference?  I got up on Saturday at 6:30, dressed, showered, and scuttled to the train station where I ate a breakfast and drank a coffee, and waited for my train to come at 8:00.  I like sitting in train stations, and of all the stations I've seen this month, I will say that Bremen has the coolest.  It looks like it jumped right out of the 1800's!

So, I had a bit of trouble figuring out which car was mine, but once I did it was smooth sailing.  Bremen to Hannover was about an hour, long enough for me to listen to an entire album of snazzy rock music.  I couldn't very well look out the window, though, as these trains go upwards around 125 miles an hour.  We flyyy buddo, and that means your scenery is a lovely blur.

I hopped off the train in Hannover, at the station that magically makes every single train late by five minutes (it's weird) and stood on the platform watching pigeons for about twenty-five minutes.  Then I easily hopped onto a bigger, faster, cooler train that was on its way to Berlin, and off we went.

We pulled into the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (central station) and I got off, all bright eyed and eager.  Then I looked up.

So, Berlin is a kinda big city right?  Probably the biggest city I've ever been to.  It's huge, and also a MAJOR hub in the European rail system.  So, the station is five stories tall.  The deepest part, where I was, has east/west trains, and the top floor has north/south trains.  At least, I think that's how it worked.  It seemed logical.

I eventually found my way out of the station, crossed a river, and found myself in a very large park.  And from that park, I saw to my right the Reichstag, or parliament building.  I mention this not only because it's cool, but because the building really embodies German architecture.  Old building with modern touches.

I then walked to the Brandenburg Gate, because it was right there and I wanted to see it gosh darn it!  It was cool.  I walked through it.  I took pictures.  Obligations over.  From there, desperate to escape the hordes of people because I am an introvert traveling alone and crowds make me nervous, I turned right and headed south.  Keep in mind that pretty much from here on out I'm in the former East Berlin.

At this point, I actually had a pretty good idea of where things were, at least in the central chunk of the city.  This is because of how much I had stared at a map beforehand, and the fact that there is a main road with an enormous gate right behind it that makes it really easy to navigate.

Ok, so I somehow ended up at the memorial to the jews that died during WWII.  And it was actually really cool architecturally... or artistically... whatever the correct term is.  So, it's a bunch of concrete slabs that appear to be more or less the same height, but intentionally just fluctuate enough to make this optical illusion.  However, the ground underneath them is a pit of sorts (please keep in mind that this is built on the site where the Nazi Propaganda office used to be.....) so you walk downhill until these slabs just tower over you.  They're also arranged in rows so you can easily just get lost in there.  In the picture I took, there are a couple dozen people wandering in the maze.

As cool as that was, I decided to keep going south.  I eventually ended up at the famous Potsdam Platz, which now has a shopping mall and cinema though it most certainly didn't used to, and I went in search of something to eat.  I had a schnitzel because it's quick, reliably edible, and cheap.

Anyway, I walked around Potsdam Platz for a little bit longer before I checked the time, and realized checkin was in a bit and I needed to get to... far away... within an hour and a half.

Did I mention how big Berlin is?  It's not small.  And there are many trains that will help you get around, which is good!  However, there are 3 different train lines.  The S-Bahn, the U-Bahn, and the M-Bahn.  And these are hit or miss.  The M-Bahn is the easy one- it's the street car.  It scuttles around the roads of Berlin and is the one to take if you need to get down a crowded street quickly, but you still need a lot of stops.

As for the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn (Bahn means train by the way) there doesn't seem to be anything distinguishing the two.  Generally the U-Bahn goes underground and the S-Bahn is elevated, but on occasion the U-Bahn goes up and the S-Bahn goes down.  Sometimes they run parallel, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes they seem to consistently go north/south or in a loop... there is not really a system.  Oh, and there are about 30 of each.

So, knowing that there is only one station that has a train that crosses the river Spree, I crossed the river zu Fuß, battling the crowd and getting increasingly annoyed.  I got to the closest station after the river so I could look at a map of the rail system (because that was the one thing I had not planned prior to coming, thinking oh it will be easy I mastered the Bonn subway) and the station I had ended up at was an S-Bahn only terminal, so I had to walk to the larger station three blocks away.  There I acquired a day ticked to ride the U2 up and down, went up to the elevated station, was wrong, somehow found the subway (with help), hopped on the train, and rode it to my neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg.

If you want a trendy place that's off the tourist track, with healthy not-schnitzel or wurst foodstuff, Prenzlauer Berg is where you need to go.  I didn't know this at the time of booking my hostel, but I'd accidentally picked the hipster neighborhood to stay in.  See, I'd based my hostel choice off of A: It's off Museum Island, B: I get my own room, C: Not atrociously expensive, D: Not scary.  I hit all these criteria, and my rooming situation was absolutely perfect.  If you're looking to spend a short amount of time in Berlin and are ok with having a hall bathroom (only complaint, but since I'd lived in a dorm my standards are low and I'm used to it) or thin walls (which also didn't really bother me too much) try "Old Town Hostel," it came out to be 35 euros for a night which is an amazing deal. The rest of my group stayed somewhere else and payed twice that much. And they didn't get their own room HA!

I was tired when I got there though, so I chatted with my mother for a good long while, and then went out to find somewhere close to eat.  I went up and down the main street of that area, seeing a lot of döner places, a ton of Indian places (also very trendy in Berlin), an Argentine restaurant, a Nepali restaurant, and some clubs.  I eventually settled on a quiet little pizza joint, where two guys were joking around, making European oval pizzas, and chatting with the lady in front of me in line.  I got a margarita pizza (which translates to cheese pizza by and large over here, they don't always put basil or anything on it) and it was the best pizza I've ever had.

When I returned, I showered, relaxed my poor tired legs and feet, and enjoyed having a room to myself.  Around 9:30 it began to get dark, and I quickly realized the one real flaw with the room.

The only lamp is rainbow.  You can pick whatever color you
want... as long as it's not white.  Cool, but your eyes do weird things after
being exposed to so much red... or blue... or whatever.

Next morning!

I woke up right at 7:00 after a restless night of dreaming about my struggles with the German language (probably due to the guilt that since coming to Berlin I haven't said more than a danke).  I got dressed, relaxed for a bit because it was Sunday so I didn't expect anything to open until around 8:30-9:00.  NOPE everything opens at 10 or 11.  Come on, it's Berlin!  I love it.  A never-sleeping city... unless it's 7:00 on a Sunday.

While I can't say that it bugs me, it meant I didn't get the breakfast I had wanted.  See, I had it all mapped out!  There was a smoothie and muffin joint on the way to the U2-Bahnhof, and it looked amazing and I haven't had a smoothie since June and I NEED MY GROUND UP KALE AND SPINACH PULP but it was closed :(  Many sadnesses.

I rode back to the platform I had gotten on yesterday, called Alexander Platz, and walked back towards Museum Island.  It was utterly silent.  So quiet.  This was around 9:00 in the morning, and it was silent.  What is this world?

I even passed the main cathedral of Berlin, which is the domed building on the left over there, and it was silent, too.  So weird.

Anyway, I was planning on spending the whole day in the German History Museum since I am quite capable of spending forever in a museum.  I usually don't, but this stuff genuinely interested me.  Not because I don't know my German history (quite the opposite), I wanted to see it from the German perspective.

It opened at 10, I walked around the block a few times, saw a cute doggo, saw the train that would, in a pinch, take me directly to the Hauptbahnhof if I was pressed for time, and a couple parks.  Then I went into the museum, and payed a whopping 4 euro for it!  Student discounts man.  I probably could have actually gotten in free, since I'm 18 and it said up to 18 free admission, but 4 euro seemed reasonable for a history museum ya know.

I'm glad I went in right at opening, because it got crowded around 11:00, and by then I was 1/3 of the way through the thing.  Anyway.  The label wasn't lying, it was a history of Germany from medieval to the departure of the allies.  Nothing on EU onward, but that's still, by school standards, "current".  It was two floors, and absolutely massive inside.  Clearly, the bulk of the attention was given to pre-Bismarck, although the entire bottom floor was 1919-1999.  Did I learn all that much?  Meh?  Not really.  But between this museum and the one in Bonn, the giant void of knowledge of WWII until now has successfully been filled with unpleasantries and The Wall.

The Wall.  I should probably mention that, since I was in Berlin, crossed the former Wall line at least four times, and it's what I'm no doubt going to be asked about.  Yes, I saw the wall.  Every museum in Germany has a piece of the wall.  You can't go a block in central Berlin without seeing a monument or a chunk of the wall.  It's big.  it has graffiti.  I'm sure it was terrifying when it was up.  Why do I sound so dismissive of it?  Its coming down was a big deal, and it is still a really recent thing!  Well, I wasn't alive during that time.  Until this month, really, I didn't even know what it was.  I thought it was a brick wall that separated Berlin from the Soviet Union!  I laugh at my ignorance.

And this is where the problem is.  It's so recent, that people and teachers don't talk about it because it's something you're just supposed to know, right?  The same thing with Franco and Spain, the Vietnam, Korean, Iraq, Afghanistan wars.  You never hear about them in class because the teachers lived through it, so they expect you to just know about it.  Thus, about 50 years of history flies away to the wind and the problems remain problems.  You hear all day about WW1 and WW2, but the effects?  What happened to the world?  What is happening now?  You're just supposed to know. How?  I don't know.  If I were to ask a friend about the Berlin Wall, not one of them knows what it is, or that it even existed.

This is why history is important.  That's why I went to the museum yesterday- to learn about the information not taught in school because it's too recent.  I didn't really, but it supplemented Bonn's museum which only addressed that stuff.  I'll get off my soap box now.  

I then went in search of lunch.  I found a nice little Spanish restaurant under one of the train stations, where I had chicken bathed in hot olive oil and garlic (the exact way they prepare snails in Spain, in other words, one of my favorite foods of all time) and I'll have to cook it for myself some time.  It was off the tapas menu, and I adore ordering tapas for lunch because it's the absolute best size...

Anyway, have you enjoyed the last few pictures?  They're of things I stumbled on in the main park right outside the Reichstag.  Pretty!  I wandered around in there for an hour and a half, because that wasn't enough time to see anything else and still have wiggle room to find my train in the Hauptbahnhof.  It's a huge park, and has a bell tower that plays twenty minutes of music on the hour (very strange, but it went from the 50 minute mark to the 10 minute mark).

I also saw this monument to... something... there were some panzers out front, but no signage or anything.  Any ideas on what it is?

No idea.  But it's cool.

After all this, I walked back to the train station, where I fiiiiiinally got my smoothie (actually it was juice, but there was spinach chunks all in it which meant it was good) and waited.  The ride to Hannover was easy, and then I jogged across the entire station to my connecting train, where I hopped on and found myself in one of those cute Harry Potter-esque train compartments.  I prefer the big rooms, more to look at.

 Overall, it was a very worthwhile trip and it sounds like it went way better for me than the group of people that hadn't planned anything.  Planning is good!  And bring a map with you if you travel!  Getting lost is not good!  Turns out all the pictures fit anyway, so the second post is not coming.  Until next time!