I did in fact board my aforementioned 6am plane. If you readers haven't ever taken a flight at this ungodly hour, I actually recommend it. Despite the brutal sleep deprivation required and in addition to the cheaper costs, the whole process of getting on that flight is a real experience. So we're taking the 15 minute walk to the bus stop in the freezing 3am air and pass by scenes of crazy debauchery as the bars let out. That's one thing about Dublin, the streets at weekend nights are consistently filled with drunks, so if you're a light sleeper, anywhere near an Irish pub (read: all of Dublin) is not the place for you. But imagine that, you've just woken up, packed all your stuff and are anticipating a lengthy and exciting journey, and you then find yourself passing through crowds of partyers enjoying the end of their nights...it's rather surreal. And then the airport itself is surprisingly active with most of the restaurants still open and plenty of wearied travelers passed out on the chairs, legs covering their bags. By the way, I went on this trip with my friend Diane, who also goes to Georgetown (although we never met there) and lives down the court here in Dublin. We're not going out, although everyone who saw the two of us traveling together assumed we were.
I passed out hard on the plane and a short 2 hours later, it was 9am in Berlin. We trained it to one of the main stations Alexander Platz, where I was greeted with a beautiful logo that I have not seen in many moons - Dunkin' Donuts. Ah the orange and pink never looked so good - note that I usually have 3 Coffee Coolatas a week back in Newton, where the climate is uniquely suited for growing Dunkin' Donuts cups on trees. The train station also had a ton of diverse restaurants, ranging from German joints grilling bratwursts to Vietnamese cooks creating ambiguously-national Asian food. We reached our hostel, St. Christopher's, early in the morning and learn that we can't check in until the afternoon, so we throw our bags into storage and expl
ore our surroundings. Our hostel is right in East Berlin, parts of which do look like they were under harsh Soviet control for 5 decades, and we walked around til we found the Berlin Wall. I wish I went to Hadrian's Wall in Scotland so that in conjunction with the big one in China, I could say I've been to several world famous walls, but whatever. This wall is extremely iconic and famous besides barely existing anymore, and altogether entirely odd. Unlike the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall, which were both built in antiquity for military purposes (to fend off Northern invaders) and are now protected historical sites, the Berlin Wall was of course a modern creation. It was freaking created in 1961 to keep people away from each other, a concept that really sounds totally barbaric when not referring to penitentiaries. For those unfamiliar with it, the Berlin Wall separated West Berlin, which was owned by West Germany but surrounded completely by East Germany, and East Berlin (and hence East Germany). While it served to encage the West Germans, the real reason for setting up the wall was to prevent East Germans from crossing over to West Berlin (which they could do freely), getting a West German passport and getting the hell away. The construction of the wall seems ludicrous when you realize that East Germans and West Germans weren't different people - they were all part of the same country and essentially arbitrarily divided after WWII. East and West Berliners were friends and relatives. So then the Wall was created, and actually almost done overnight in secret, so that one morning West Berlin woke up to find itself isolated. Imagine if you were an East-sider having a one night stand in the West that night - I'm not even sure if walk of shame covers that. Anyways, today most of the Wall has been destroyed, and the pieces that remain demonstrate more the artistic merits of graffiti than the symbolic barrier of the Cold War. It's tough to envision what the area used to look like, with infrastructure now resettled in areas formerly of the Wall and the divide between East and West Berlin not instantly noticeable. Without the barbed wire and East German guards, the Wall lacks any intimidation. Look at me hanging out with Gollum on the stretch of the Wall now known as the East Side Gallery.After this, we found lunch at an Indian restaurant in some random side street and were delighted at the prices. I got a nice pint of something for 3 and a half euros, and that's be just about the most expensive beer on this trip and a full euro cheaper than you can get anywhere in Dublin. The alcohol reminded us that we had woken up at 2:40am that day and we promptly returned to the hostel, checked in and crashed. What was originally meant to be a 2 hour nap crept past the 3 hour mark and by the time we woke up it was dinnertime and our hostel room was buzzing. We discovered that our hostel was inhabited by cool people, but we wouldn't really experience that until the next day. Hungry and wanting to sample German food, we learned about a Christmas market and ventured towards it. We would find many more markets like this on our little vacation, but this first one was the coolest. On a cold dark night in East Berlin, the merry, lit tents of this Christmas market sold hot foods, steaming drinks and various cheap
goods and otherwise exuded Christmas cheer. The sausages smelled great, the crepes were delicious, and I also bought a hat, an ornament and a mug, which happened to come with apple cider + alcohol. The mug is in my left hand in this one and my dinner in my right. The market even had a tiny ice skating circle where lots of little German kids were slipping and sliding.Afterwards, we were in the drinking kind of mood, because you know we're in Europe, but we realized it was Sunday. So we decided to join a pub crawl advertised on our hostel map. And it was well worth it. This 12 Euro excursion was surprisingly well-attended, with about 20 people mostly English speaking. The meeting place was this uber-sketchy bar-ish establishment that was probably a bomb shelter 30 years ago. We were greeted with free, cheap beer, which normally would excite me but after a semester of great beer in Dublin, I could barely drink it. Nonetheless, I did, and partook in a few group shots of orange vodka before heading out to slightly less seedy places. Our group, led by an Israeli, essentially made up all the patrons of every single bar we went to. Side note: there were a fair amount of Israelis in the city. I do not know the historical reasons behind this. It was really cool to enter as a group and just take over a bar and not feel guilty about it (like you would if you were with a bunch of underage college kids). I really enjoyed talking with all these different people on the trip and really it shouldn't be that big a surprise that we were all people in our young 20s traveling around Europe looking for adventure. Who else would go on a 12 euro pub crawl? Not localers, and not high rollers, just poor kids old enough to be able to travel on their own but young enough that they don't feel the need to be productive and contribute to society. I met a lot of cool Australians and Americans, all on various stages of their various journeys of various lengths, but the most memorable ones were these two American girls from Ohio.
I think they were studying or working in England and just traveling for a couple of days, but they got wasted (or pissed, as the Australians said) and started pole dancing on the subway and otherwise acting like obnoxious Americans. The night ended at this club called Matrix which was slightly less sketchy than the other bars though it was located right by the Wall. I think by the end of the night I was 8 drinks deep and Diane was around 10 and we were all having a good time. I won't go into all the details of that club but let's just say I took a cab ride home alone.The next day we woke up, not in the best of shape but in time for the free hostel breakfast. There was a walking tour leaving our hostel at 10:30am that we somehow missed and thus we were left to explore Berlin on our own. We decided we'd go on this other tour at 1 and check
out as much of the city as we could before then. Well we hopped on the metro and arrived at Potsdamer Platz, a shopping center located in West Berlin and decidedly reeking of capitalism. Christmas cheer was decadently displayed at a mall there, and large lego statues (including a giraffe and a Santa) served as street decoration. From there we wandered to a Holocaust Memorial. This memorial was only created 4 years ago, by a Jewish architect from New York, and is essentially a field of rectangular slabs sticking out from the stone-tiled floor. The blocks are all lined up in an ordered grid but are of various heights, and in addition the ground level changes drastically throughout the memorial. Thus the sense of the memorial is to connote some sort of ordered chaos. I didn't entirely understand what the archietect was attempting to convey and really didn't find it as powerful as the monuments in DC. If anyone would like to read about the Memorial for the Murdered Jews, click here. A block from there was the Brandenburg Gate, which frankly I had only previously seen on Euro coins from Germany. I was somewhat surprised to hear that it is one of the greatest icons in Europe and acted as a symbolic gate from East to West Berlin. The gate is basically a gigantic facade of 6 free standing columns with a Greek statue of Athena on the top. 
Napoleon stole this statue upon conquering the city, and when he was defeated 8 years later, the Germans took it back. It now glares at the French Embassy, situated about 40 meters away. Also in the vicinity is the Reichstag, an incredible capitol building with a ton of controversial political history. The Reichstag has a glass dome on top of the parliament, where tourists walk around, but the wait for this was too long.Unfortunately around this time, the weather got from cold to wet and miserable. We did go on the 1pm free tour, which is where I learned most of this history, but had to cut it short before I lost my extremeties. From there we ventured to Museum Isle, which as the name implies, houses several museums. Several of them were under construction and also closed on Mondays, and we mostly kept ourselves to taking pictures and going inside the Egyptian one for a half hour or so. Nothing too remarkable. Then on a whim, I decided we should check out the Olympic Stadium
and we learned that it was just off a subway station (the U-bahn) about 40 minutes away. It was dark by the time we got there and the actual stadium (now a monument) was closed, but I got a few shots from outside and now I can say that I've been to two Olympic Stadiums from games 72 years apart.A reststop back at the hostel introduced us better to our roommates. First we took the same elevator as Boreck (like a combination of Borat and Barack), a German Turk who was moving from Frankfurt, evidently permanently. I had known that there was a large Turkish population in Germany but I hadn't known why, and Boreck explained that many of them moved in after the War to rebuild Germany. He spoke German and was the only person we met in the hostel who was not a native English speaker. He claimed not to speak Turkish but his English accent didn't sound like that of a German speaker but rather Middle Eastern so I don't know about that. We were initially really creeped out by him because when we said we were in room 1, he was like, "me too!" I took my passport with me when we left for dinner (ironically I got a doner kebab). We also met many Australians, whom I've noticed love to travel through Europe. Basically traveling throughout Europe like we do is somewhat restricted to Anglophones or accomplished multilinguals, because English is the semi-functioning lingua franca. I think Australians are like more aware Americans and are thus overrepresented in European hostels. They have a closer connection to Europe because colonialism was more recent in that country, and perhaps due to their isolation and remoteness, many Australians recognize the need to see more of the world. It seems like a great culture. We met people from Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, basically every single city I can name in Australia. I'd like to highlight two characters.
Elliot was from Brisbane and represented Australia as the starting goalie of their U-17 team. I was really surprised to hear that he was an elite athlete, because he was clearly many months removed from his playing shape and didn't even bring it up until I asked him if he played sports. He was a soft 6 feet when I met him. Anyways he had come up to England to play semi-pro ball and work part time as a bartender, and described it as pretty boring because there was nothing to do in the day. Sure at night the Brits would go and get drunk just like the Aussies, but during the day when he'd be wakeboarding or barbecueing in Australia, here he'd probably just be staring at the rain. Then he went to Crete during the summer to work as a bartender at a resort town that was a hotspot for British tourists. He said the bar there raked in 60,000 euros a night and that the owner didn't care if they drank on the job. So he'd be there all night getting wasted and saw so much crazy shit. He would sometimes spot a pretty girl in the crowd, tell the server to give her a shot and say it was from him. Then he would make eye contact, take the shot with her, and in his words, it was "game over" from there. Smooth. To the young males out there, I'd recommend going to bartending school. And for the young females who want to get hit on by drunk guys, you can do that too. Elliot had been in Europe for over a year and had spent the last month or so traveling from city to city and was due back in Australia for Christmas.
Francesca was from Adelaide and had been backpacking nonstop for like 6 months. Honestly I don't know how anyone does that but it's a story I've heard a few times. She'd come in with just summer clothes and had since bought a few sweaters and a jacket. Along the way she'd visited France, Italy, Spain and Ibiza, in great summertime weather, and the rest of the continent in colder weather. On our first night, we had asked if she wanted to come drinking with us but opted instead for an easy night at the bar with a friend she had met on a tour earlier. She stumbled back to the room at 6:30am and somehow got up for breakfast, where she was a wreck. She also carried an iPod speaker in her oversized backpack, which she described as a great purchase because it helped to increase social interaction within hostel rooms, which indeed to prove handy.
So we hung out in the room for a while before going down to our lobby/bar and drank with these people we had just met. Boreck the Turk had been proudly showing off his "good friend" Jim Beam, a bottle he had bought that day that he was very happy to share with us. I only had one shot, but him and this other Australian (physics PhD) basically killed it between them. Boreck drank the whiskey in bed and stayed there, passing out before 9 and never made it down to the bar with us. The bar had a 2 Carlsberg for 3 euro deal going on and I took full advantage of that. That night I had some of the best bar conversations I've ever had and learned so much about about Europe, Australia, life and whatnot. I also met this girl Caitlyn from Melbourne who was born on July 22, 1988 and to date I think she's the only person I've ever met with my exact same birthdate. This was a huge cause for commotion when we discovered this fact and it was enough to warrant a Facebook friending.
So I left Berlin with great experiences and a newer and better understanding of the world. After a delicious lunch of sushi at the Berlin central station, we boarded a 1 o'clock train to Prague, and I will talk about those adventures in a different post. I'd just like to expound a bit more about Berlin because it was my favorite city out of the 3 that I visited, despite being the ugliest and smelliest. The hostel actually had a lot to do with that, but I enjoyed it mostly because I think Berlin has the most fascinating, compelling 20th century history of any city in the world. Paris, Rome or Cairo could make a case for the most interesting history of all time, and Beijing has undergone a lot in the last 100 years too, but I think Berlin has got to take the cake. It started the century as an Imperial capital, got besieged in a world war and underwent a revolution that deposed and exiled the Kaiser. It suffered through an unbelievable economic depression with historical hyperinflation never before seen and then the fall of the unstable democratic government. It saw the rise of a Nazi dictatorship led by a man who got rejected by art school, held an Olympics and subsequently became the center of the worst war we've ever had. It was then bombed, conquered and divded 4 ways. Then it found itself at the center of a new war, the Cold War, the divisions became deeper until the formation of the aforementioned Wall. The divided city was again essentially sieged and then there was the airlift. Then Kennedy came and gave a great speech ("Ich bin ein Berliner!"), then Reagan went and did the same ("Tear down this wall!" And then the Wall was torn, and then the reunification of an economic powerhouse with a sputtering economy met some predictable snags. Overall, the city's been through a hell of a lot, and I find that pretty cool.
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