Yeah, that one
She led us around Brandenburg Gates, and pointed out the famous hotel where Michael Jackson dangled Blanket over the railing of his hotel room in 2004. Our guide led us to the Holocaust Memorial, and to Hitler's Bunker, which had been turned into a parking lot. We saw the Ministry of Finance, which originally housed the air force headquarters for the German army. This was later to be called the Ministry of Ministries (pretentious much?), and was the seat of Nazi power. Our guide informed us that this building could be seen in the blockbuster film Valkyrie.
We were examining the remains of the Berlin Wall when our luck took a turn for the worst. It started raining, but not like Oregon rain, which is 10 months of a steady drizzle - prompting Oregonians to endure perpetual dampness for a few fleeting moments of sunshine; no, this was a quick hard rain that turned the sky black and our shoes to squishy sponges. We waited it out in a coffee shop where I had a most delicious chocolate croissant. The rain left as quickly as it had come, rising to a crashing crescendo only to recede over the skyline, and leaving only a memory of its violent nature. Sound familiar?
A picture of one of my shoes-------->
After the quick storm, we checked out Checkpoint Charlie, Babelplatz (where we saw a troop of speedoed bicyclists), Museum Island, Humbolt University (Einstein's old stomping grounds), a Cathedral that housed a melange of different architecture types - the name of which has escaped me at the moment, impressive but forgettable. After that the tour was over, and we had to find another hostel to stay that night.
Before that we went to the train station to find a ride to Paris, my goal being to visit a French speaking country before leaving Europe, and my sister's goal being to celebrate her birthday on the Seine. However, fate had other plans for us. The attendant didn't speak English, and was thoroughly rude. She blabbered away in German, leaving me and my sister helpless, and fearing we'd be stuck in Berlin forever! Thankfully a young bilingual German man helped us. He translated the woman's blabbering, and said it wasn't good. All trains in and out of France were booked, and the only way we could get out of Berlin was to go to Amsterdam. We took it, and also booked a hostel for the night. It was cheap, but out in the boondocks. We decided to check it out and drop our bags off before dinner.
We showed up to our hostel, which smelled like cigarette smoke, beer, and body oder. They gave us two beds in separate rooms, my sister would be sleeping in a room with two guys from Germany, and I would be in the room with a Serbian family that smelled
like cabbage. We dropped our bags and left to get authentic German cuisine, weinershnitzel.What I was expecting, but didn't get
The place we went, which seemed authentic enough, served us the equivalent of a battered shoe sole. I was thoroughly unimpressed, and instead of finishing it I sat back and drank beer instead. We decided to go into town after dinner, which was a great because I wanted to at least see the night life of Berlin before we left.
We did our pub crawl, and ended up in a bar that was decorated "Under the Sea" style, complete with a pirate for a bar tender. Now this is what I remember it being, however, at that point I had enough beer to drown a fish, and was having a hard time sitting up in my chair. On the tramride back to our gritty hostel my sister sat next to a gentleman who had fallen asleep. As soon as the tram stopped the man suddenly snapped awake after flinging himself in dramatic fashion across my sisters lap. Bleary eyed he looked around, and then bolted out of the tram and down the street, leaving my sister and me in a fit of laughter. We got back to the hostel, and I had no problem falling asleep.
