Friday evening we arrived in Berlin. We took a taxi to our hostel, the Generator Hostel, which was really nice. We went out to dinner that night at an Italian restaurant near our hostel. Since we had arrived so late and wanted to do the tour in the morning, we decided to take it easy and watch a movie in the hostel’s lounge area instead of going out. Then, we headed to bed early (although we kept getting woken up as our six other hostel mates came in at all hours of the night.
Saturday morning we woke up, got ready, and ate breakfast just to discover that it was pouring rain and freezing outside. We had planned on going on a 3-hour walking tour that morning, but decided to wait it out and see if the afternoon cleared up and we could go on the tour in the afternoon. When it was still pouring rain and cold at 1pm (the time of the second tour), we decided to take it easy for the day because of the miserable weather (our hostel was far from the city center, so it would have taken about 30 minutes to get there in the rain). We did decide, however, to venture out a little bit in search of food. We asked a worker at the hostel for a recommendation of a stop on the S-Bahn (one of Berlin’s public transports) where we could get some good food. Despite his advice being terrible, we still managed to find a restaurant (he sent us to a place full of dollar stores and erotica… not really sure what he thought we were looking for when we said ‘food’). After dinner we went back to the hostel, watched another movie, and went to bed early again in hopes that the next day the weather would be nicer.
Our wish was granted on Sunday when it finally stopped raining. The weather was still chilly (mid-40s), but we ventured out to the main square of Berlin to meet up with the free tour. The tour began at the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin. We then got to see a number of important sites, including the bunker where Hitler shot himself (now a parking lot), some remnants of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie (an American Army checkpoint during the separation of East and West Berlin),German Parliament, the site of the Nazi book burnings, ex-Nazi and Soviet Union headquarters, and a Jewish Holocaust memorial. Each of these sites had so much history, and it was especially interesting how the history tied in to the history of the rest of the world, and especially the rest of Europe.
Once we finished the tour, Alex and I headed towards Potsdamer Platz, a main shopping and entertainment district in Berlin. We had decided that we wanted to see the Blue Man Group in Berlin, and Potsdamer Platz was the location of the theatre and ticket office. Amazingly, we managed to secure second-row center seats (at a student-discount price!!) an hour and a half before the show. We quickly grabbed dinner at a German restaurant (surprisingly, Germany restaurants are hard to come by in Berlin) before heading to the show.
As a preface, I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I agreed to see the Blue Man Group. Apparently Alex did. When we arrived in the theatre, there were rain ponchos on the backs of our seats that we were instructed to put on. Only the first five rows had ponchos. This scared me a little bit, but in the end they turned out to be slightly unnecessary (mostly because we weren’t in the line of fire). The show was a mix of rhythmic/drumming and comedy. The Blue Men loved to make the audience uncomfortable, which included climbing over the seats, making awkward jokes, and picking people out of the audience and bringing them on stage. The whole show was very entertaining, and the men who perform in it are extremely talented. I had no idea that the show required so much talent before I saw it. I also must recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity (they perform in a number of locations around the United States ,as well as in Berlin and Tokyo.)
After we left the show, we decided to head back to the Brandenberg Gate in order to do some souvenir shopping and then eat. We ate at an Argentinian steakhouse and had the most rude waitress. She basically hated us for being American/speaking English, and was polite to every other table except ours. However, I have to be grateful that this hasn’t happened in any other places thus far, as I have heard that many people are particularly rude to Americans.
After dinner we headed back to our hostel, hung out for a bit, and then headed to bed. We packed up in the morning and caught the train to Zurich, Switzerland!
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Have you ever seen Arrested Development? Because the whole Blue Man group thing totally made me think of it and I chuckled the rest of the way through this post.
ReplyDeleteBerlin sounds awesome though. I've never really wanted to go to Germany, but now I kinda want to check it out.