The Grand Adventure- Berlin

The train ride from Amsterdam to Berlin was pretty long, about 6 or 7 hours I think. We were on the train basically all day. It wasn't too bad, though, and we were thankful for the rest and caught up on some sleep. We arrived in Berlin in the evening and checked into our hostel, which was outside the city a ways, but in a pretty cute part of town. Our hostel in Amsterdam had been in a really grungy not-pretty part of town. So already things were better.

We didn't have any solid plans for the evening, so we just took a metro into town and looked around for somewhere to eat. We came out of the subway at Potsdamerplatz, and were immediately floored. The architecture there is AMAZING. It's completely modern, cause of course everything was rebuilt after the war. It's towering buildings of glass and pyramids and angles and open space, and come out from under ground at night, it was absolutely beautiful. To steal a picture from the internet, this is exactly what we saw:
Right away we knew it was going to be better than Amsterdam.

We wandered around looking for a place to eat and pounced on the first reasonably-priced place we saw. We didnt realize that it was an American-themed restaurant until we got inside and saw toothpicks with little American flags on them in all of the sandwiches. I think the waiter was a little amused by us, a huge pack of Americans ordering currywurst and bratwurst in a place advertising their hamburgers and milkshakes.

So that was our first night.

We found out that there was a free walking tour of the city put on by New Berlin (a subset of New Europe- they do free tours in several cities across europe, working on a tips-only system). Unfortunately, SOME people in our group have trouble getting up in the morning (it absolutely amazes me that the girls can shower, dress, do their hair, put on makeup, and be down the stairs to breakfast while the boys have barely gotten past picking up a pair of jeans) and we missed the tour. We decided to do some wandering of our own, and made our way to the Reichstag, Berlin's Parliament building. Again, to steal from the internet:


It's a huge beautiful building that was basically rubble during the war- it was the fire started here supposedly by a communist that allowed Hitler to claim absolute power over the country.

We amused ourselves taking silly pictures in front of it and then wandered over to the Brandenburg gate- where we ran into the tour we'd missed! We jumped on board, and it ended up being the best decision ever. The tour guide (Pete O'Keefe- rather Irish) was amazing. You could tell he loved the city and the history of it, and was really enthusiastic telling us stories about everything we saw. I learned so much on that tour, I can't convey the half of it. We saw an amazing Holocaust memorial that was unlike anything I'd seen before, and the site of Hitler's bunker where he killed himself- now an unmarked parking lot. We saw the Berlin Wall and Nazi architecture (the most depressing thing you'll ever see) and Communist propaganda murals and so much more. Every tour we took after that we compared to Pete O'Keefe. :)

The same tour company offered a guided nightly pub crawl and we went on that that evening- that was the other best decision we made. It was such a hassle to get everyone to agree on a place to go at night and an even bigger hassle to get everyone there and happy, that taking the responsibility out of our hands and just following people who knew the city from bar to bar was amazing. It allowed us to actually have fun and stay friends without biting each other's heads off. :) We met some cool Australians and Canadians that night, too.

The second day we all went off and did our own thing. Maggie, Christine, and I decided to take a day trip to Potsdam, a town just outside of Berlin. We didn't make it in time for the free guided tour by New Potsdam, but a paid tour was leaving just as we got there and we jumped on. It ended up being completely worth it. Potsdam is HUGE (or rather, very spread out) and we never would have found all the interesting things on our own. They took us on a tour trolly which had an audio tour in English that told you about what you were passing, and then we stopped at all the big palaces and the tour guide took us around. We saw Cecilianhof, where the Big Three met for the Potsdam Conference (and had our picture taken in the same spot they did!) and Sanssouci Palace, Freidrich The Great's palace from which he introduced the potato to the German people. There were potatoes on his gravestone. :) It was definitely the most beautiful palace we saw:
It wasn't green like this when we saw it, but the yellow was still striking. They love Freidrich the Great in Germany. He's kind of a big deal.

After the tour we did some window-shopping in the town, had dinner, and went back to the Reichstag to climb to the top, which was free, and amazing. I was almost more impressed with the dome than the view, though that was fantastic. They also had an exhibit of the history of the Reichstag building in its various stages, which I was looking at when Dad called me and I got to tell him I was standing on the top of the Reichstag. Definitely one of my favorite buildings in Berlin, partly for the history and partly for the architecture. This is what the dome looks like from the inside:

except we were there at night, which I thought was a good decision. You could see into the Parliament room from the top there too, which was cool.

So, I'm in love with Berlin. :) That's the conclusion of that story! Next stop was Prague, another adventure I'll write about later.

The Grand Adventure- Amsterdam

Hello family and friends! I wish I could have updated more regularly, but I've been staying in hostels for the past 3 weeks and internet access has been sporadic and at times, expensive. Fortunately my current hostel has free internet, and I wanted to start giving an account of my travel experiences. It's absolutely impossible to go over everything that's happened the past three weeks, cause it's been a LOT. But I'll start giving summaries of where I've been.

We caught a cab at 4 in the morning the day we left and were at the airport before dawn. At that point there were only 4 other people with me. Our flight and everything went smoothly and we arrived in Amsterdam when we'd expected- to find it snowing, and hard. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of our visit there. It was bitterly cold and windy, the kind of cold where you don't even want to be outside, let alone outside waiting for public transportation that doesn't come when or where you expect it to, which happened quite a few times. My friend Christine and I spent a frustrating hour one day trying to find the Hop On-Hop Off bus around town. We saw it two or three times, driving away from us (This was after finding out that our transportation pass did not in fact include the river ferries, which was very disappointing). Tourist info told us that apparently it didn't have a set stopping point and we had to wait for it to drive by and flag it down. We tried that, too, for another 15 or 20 minutes and failed. By the time we gave up my hands (in gloves, in pockets) were so cold that they hurt. We ran into a nearby cafe and had pastries and hot drinks, after which Amsterdam was a little redeemed for us. Possibly the worst experience, though, was trying to navigate the night bus system. We ended up on the wrong bus, at the wrong stop, walking back to the hostel in the bitter cold late at night, getting more and more angry at each other (particularly the boy who had led us onto that bus). That was resolved by jumping into a random taxi that drove by, though. I seem to have good luck finding random taxis at the right time. We were so cold when we got back that we turned the hot water on all the way in the shower, crammed into the bathroom, closed the door, and let it fill with steam. It felt wonderful.

So, weather was not a selling point. Possibly the coldest spring break I've ever had....

Not everything was crummy about Amsterdam, though. We did find a couple nice cafes and the canals were gorgeous. It was just that the entire town felt like it had nothing to offer except tourism. Once you get the typical Amsterdam things that everyone comes for out of the way- finding a hash bar, walking down the Red Light District, and making a run through the Sex Museum- there isn't a whole lot else to do except buy wooden shoes, a tulip, and call it a day. So, while we were all glad to finally be out traveling, and the sights were beautiful, we were all happy to leave and vow never to come back after our couple days' visit.

Our next stop, Berlin, was INFINITELY better than Amsterdam and was pretty much amazing in every way. I think it was the universal favorite city for all of us. But I'll write about that later....

Love you all!

Helen