Berlin Babez

We realise that we have in fact been travelling for sometime and have been to 3 cities and havent made a post yet, so we'll just make 3 posts in quick succession

We will be better from now on, we promise... maybe.

Ok, anyway:

BERLIN

We met up in LDN on Wed 22nd and spent a couple of days jammin. you know, going to the Red Lion in Twickenham, going to London Dungeons, losing the Eurail passes worth about $1500 each.... just the usual. (We found the passes, by the way.)

Beatrix put up with us with a remarkable lack of impatience and frustration for a couple of days, cooking us delicious meals etc. She took us to HP06 and London Dungeons and attempted to take us to Convent Garden to a Banksy exhibition (but my carelessness with the Eurail passes put a stop to that as we spent the afternoon making phone calls instead). We also ate a lot of Pret, mainly the "very berry breakfast bowl" which was tres delicious.

On Saturday morning, we headed out to Luton Airport to catch our easy jet flight, which was pretty uneventful.

We arrived at Schoenfeld in Berlin and Jess, Claire and Campbell (Claire's friend) were waiting for us. We had a bit of a trek to our hostel which was in Spandau, which is in West Berlin. We had a whole room to ourselves and it was light and airy and clean and all the things you expect a hostel not to be. It was also 4 storeys up with no lift. But it was still remarkably nice.

For dessert, we ate a miraculous creation called Spaghetti Eis which is vanilla ice-cream pushed through a machine to make it look like spaghetti strands (kind of like play-dough i guess?) with fruit sauce and shaved coconut (or as the germanians call it- kokosnuB) on top, creating the illusion of a dish of pasta. Basically, it was the best meal of my life.

We went to a club called Fritzl in East Berlin, which was once a major post office. It was majorly cool and pleased us all by playing boom boom pow, heavy cross (YAY) and then, just before we left, pokerface. Smiles all round.

The next day, we all went to see the East Side Gallery. It is the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin wall, and it is covered in graffiti art and street art and is really really incredible. Our favourite artwork was a piece of toast stuck to the wall and named Kif. We chilled by the River Spree for the rest of the evening and watched the sun set.

On Monday we went on a walking tour called Red Berlin which was quite fascinating and mildly amusing due to the nature of our tour guide. Nikolai, our Bulgarian team leader, began the tour by saying "I should tell you, my doctor says I have to be careful because I have" - I thought he was going to say swine flu... - "sunstroke, so we will be staying in the shadow during the tour". Nikolai's father was a famous mathematician and had moved their family to America seeking political asylum while his grandparents remained in Bulgaria being monitored by the Bulgarian equivalent of Stazi. Because of this, Nikolai was more than a little biased and made comments such as "I find it curious that although this building is no longer used for intelligence purposes, we are still being monitored. There are cameras here (he points), here and here." He also began many sentences with "I find it ironic..." and warned us that "1 in every 177 people was a Stazi informant, so look around you when we walk down the street. We're going to see more than 177 people so chances are we'll see at least one."

That evening, we went to a bar called Circus (via happy hour at our hostel The Generator and €2.90 cocktails at the doner kebab store around the corner) which serves 2 litre boots of beer for €8. The story goes that you drink the boot and then you boot and one member of our party lived up to the legend.

On Tuesday we went to the Brandenberg Gate and the Reichstag which was pretty cool. Sadly, the dome at the top was closed but we still got an amazing view of the city. We saw Bruno in the evening, and Claire, Campbell and Jess dominated The Generator's Berlin Trivia Night, winning by about 7 points.

Wednesday was our last full day in Berlin. In the morning we went with Jess to the Modern Art Museum. Afterwards, we met up with Claire and Campbell for a picnic lunch in the Tiergarten which was beautiful. In the afternoon, Lucy and Claire went to the Berlin Zoo and the rest of the Ausgang rented a boat in the Tiergarten and then went to the memorial church (a semi-destroyed church left in its post-war condition as a monument). We went to Bang Bang Club that night which was entertaining due to Wednesday being Berlin's gay+lesbian night.

Thursday we headed for Amsterdam while C+C headed for Prague. The next chapter of our adventure awaited us.