Berlin etc.

My first full week in Germany! And I already managed to squeeze in some traveling :P Many stories to ensue, and I'm going to try and add pictures for the first time, which will probably mean a rather long post - get excited :)

Last week wasn't super exciting but had some highlights. I practiced with the Würzburg ultimate team, Disc-0-Fever, Wed for womens and Thurs for open practice. It's really fun playing with them because they basically warm up, run a couple of drills and then scrimmage for an hour, so lots of playing :) They actually asked me to play with them this weekend in their equivalent of intervarsities, but I wasn't sure if I counted as a student and wanted to go to Berlin so didn't. It was cool that they asked though! After open practice I went with Hayley and two Germans to get ice cream (Eis - one of the few German words i know :P ). Eis stands are all over, and its really cheap - 80-90 cents a scoop! - so we eat a lot of ice cream.

On Friday my room mates and I went to visit a friend at the restaurant she works at, and get crepes and beer. It was really good, and good weather for sitting outside. The two boys left to go too the "Free and Outside" music festival while Hayley and I stayed because we were leaving early the next day. We ended up talking for a while to a man sitting next to us about America. It was cool, and interesting.

The next morning we left early (tram at 6:49) for Berlin. It took just just under 5 hours to get there, but we made it safe and excited. We found our hostel and left our backpacks before heading out to the city. Our first stop was the East Side Gallery, which is the longest section of the Berlin Wall left standing. We walked along it and took lots of pictures. It is now basically a graffiti gallery, with some pretty cool paintings! Some of them were still in progress, and one guy was painting :)

We left the wall and headed into the more central part of town, which is supposed to be a hip area/good place for bars. We decided that we could use a late afternoon cocktail after our walking and so went to find a good place. Along the way we tried currywurst from a stand. It's basically brautwurst but with a tomatoey-curry sauce and is supposed to be a Berlin specialty. It was pretty good, even for me who doesn't like tomatoes :P

We found an Indonesian restaurant that had a pretty good happy hour, so we decided to go there. After drinks we walked to Museuminsel, a small island in the middle of the river that has a bunch of museums on it. On the way we got distracted by an open market that had a lot of random things for sale, especially old records. I ended up buying a pair of earrings that are puzzle pieces :)

After the market we went on to the island and took a lot of pictures of a cool looking building, I think it was called the Berlin Dom, but I'm not sure. It had a cool fountain though, which made a rainbow :)From here we headed to Checkpoint Charlie, which was the point from which you used to be able to go from East to West Germany. They had a really cool wall explaining the history of Berlin, which was really cool to read, and a good history refresher for me :P We decided to go back to the hostel before continuing our touring, so we took the tram back, officially checked in and had a short break before continuing to Alexanderplatz, which it turns out is mostly shopping and a big tower that is expensive to go into. We wandered around a bit, took lots of pictures, and searched for food (which was actually hard to find cheaply - this surprised us as Berlin is apparently where döner, the ultimate delicious, cheap, eat on the street food, originated). We finally just took the tram back to a place we had seen earlier and ate a late dinner. We decided for the novelty factor that we would take beer with us on the tram (which you are allowed to do in Berlin). Back at the hostel we just went to bed, as it had been a rather long day.

The next morning we started out with tasty (but kinda expensive) breakfast at our hostel and then headed to the zoo. It took us a while to get there as there was a bike race and so buses weren't running, but we made it and looked at lots and lots of cute animals, and of course took lots of pictures :) I liked this bird, he was trying to eat the camera :)

After the zoo we tried to go to a massive department store, KaDeWe, but sadly it was closed on sunday :( So instead we hate lunch of chips and currywurst and headed to the Brandenburg Gate. It was really cool, very massive. Again, pictures and a cool history lesson before heading out. We decided to head back to Würzburg at this point, so walked towards the train station. On the way we were going to go in the Reichstag, but there was a very long line and so decided against it. At the train station we found a very cheap ice cream stand and so had one last cone before getting on our train back to Würzburg.


We had some interesting adventures getting home - our first train was full so we had to just sit in the aisles between compartments (normal in Germany). Then, apparently our second train was delayed, but a train also going to Frankfurt was coming in at the same time, but this one didn't go to Würzburg. Guess which one we got on... An hour later we ended up in the Frankfurt Hauptbanhof and realized we had made a mistake, but luckily there was a train literally about to leave for Würzburg (we double checked this time) so we jumped on it and finally made it home. Long, but fun trip.

One more fun story as to why I should probably learn German (you would think I would have thought about this before moving to Germany). Today we decided to make chicken and pasta for dinner because we had bought a big thing of breast meat of what we thought was chicken - we don't know German, but what else is pink and sold in filets? Well, apparently turkey is because when we opened the container to take out what we expected to be several chicken breasts we found one very large filet. By very large I mean about the size of a plate. Thanks to a translator I now know that Putenbrust = turkey breast :P