July 16th:
We left early for the Color Festival with a bunch of Lisa's friends, and Paulina, Lisa's friend Sophie's Mexican exchange student. It was a little awkward starting the dancing, and once it started, I couldn't really get that into it because I felt horribly squished the entire time. Then, I got hit square in one eye with the powder and it hurt LIKE HELL. Never again. NEVER AGAIN. The idea is whimsical and fun in theory, but in practice it just leads to horrible things (like multicolored snot, horrible eye pain, skin and hair moisture-sucking-super-damaging dryness, and lots of coughing). I do have some cool photos, though!
Before:
After:
On Sunday the 17th, Lisa, Sophie, Paulina and I set off for Berlin. We took a bus to Munich, then another (double-decker!) bus to Berlin. The ride there was uneventful, but what was fascinating was that in just that 7.5 hour journey, I saw more solar panels and more wind turbines than in my entire life up to this point. Really cool! But that's where the cool part ends.
When we got to the bus station, we couldn't figure out how to get to the U-Bahn. When we got the the U-Bahn, we couldn't figure out which tickets. When we figured out the tickets, we couldn't find the right train. When we figured out the right train, we realized we had purchased the wrong tickets :-( That was just the beginning.
We finally got off the train at Nollendorfplatz and immediately encountered the street festival the hotel had warned us about. What we weren't warned about, however, was that it was a gay pride festival that took over the entire neighborhood. Here we are, four teenage girls carrying all sorts of luggage, clearly lost in what I would later discover is Berlin's most prominent gayborhood...at almost 10 o'clock at night.
Nobody we asked had any clue where our hotel was, nobody had internet on their phones, and with only the streetlights and the ambient light from the festival, we couldn't read house numbers or street signs too well, so we were left with a not-too-detailed map and only a vague direction as to where we were going. What didn't help at all was that there were some *ahem* "interesting" stores that cater to the gay community here (I'll leave you to fill in the blanks), which only made the whole situation even more uncomfortable and odd.
I never felt unsafe necessarily (there were so many people around, even a few police in the area, and it's not as though we were wandering dark back alleys) but the thought of "what do I do should some strange drunk guy come up to our group" or some such other similar situation was definitely something that I found myself preparing for.
After probably 20-30 minutes of being what felt like hopelessly lost, we finally found our hotel. A man came to the door only after an agonizing minute-and-a-half where we were a little freaked out that nobody was coming, and he led us inside. My German still isn't good enough to understand everything, especially not when people mumble or speak quickly, but what little I got from the man was...I can't really put my finger on it...offputting. And not in any specific way. All I understood was the fact that THE KITCHEN ABSOLUTELY MUST REMAIN CLEAN. Okay? :-0
Now, I stress here that the man never in any way did anything wrong or untowards towards us (other than being kind of rude, as Lisa and Sophie explained later) or even gave the impression of anything sinister. However, we are taught as women to pay attention to our surroundings and be sensitive as to when something doesn't feel right, much more so than men. And a strange, gruff man leading a group of four teenage girls into a darkened hotel courtyard, then into a darkened hotel room (directly from the courtyard) and locking the secondary entrance door behind us (we couldn't feasibly get our bags up the long, steep main entrance stairs) was unsettling to say the least.
The man showed us (more so Lisa and Sophie, the only ones who could understand him) the room, then Sophie and Lisa left with him, telling me and Paulina to stay here in the room with our stuff. We didn't have our keys yet, so just leaving it unattended, even in our hotel room, wasn't really a good idea, and the building is old enough we received legit metal manual keys, meaning that the doors don't lock behind you like any other more modern hotel. I didn't understand where they were going, but I figured there was at least two of them. Nobody goes alone, right? And my fears weren't actually founded in any kind of positive action on the part of the man...but still. Creepy. If it had been daytime, I don't think I would have had any problem.
Nevertheless, I did what any easily flustered worrywort would do: I checked the rest of the room for an escape plan :-) We're on the ground floor, so the option to climb out a window into the adjacent courtyard to scream and get to the street or climbing the fence out of our own private garden into an parking lot next door could work. And, coming back to the whole prominent gayborhood part, there are plenty of open "businesses" nearby that would be open at any time of night (if you catch my drift) in a true emergency *shudderlaugh*.
Our room secured and my emergency plan in place, I began to worry about Lisa and Sophie, who still hadn't returned. I figured if there was no screaming (the hotel is small enough that it would be hard not to hear anything) everything, everything was probably fine, but still. Our room is the last one, a complete dead end, so Paulina waited at the door and watched me as I went down the hallway towards the check-in and, once satisfied, returned when I heard their voices.
Despite the rough start, everything else has been good. It's a little hard navigating Berlin's maze of S- and U-Bahns (Street- and Underground-trains)...
But we've gotten better. Yesterday we were constantly crossing our fingers hoping that we were on the right train but today we got everywhere we wanted to go without much problem. On the 18th, we went to some of the highlights:
Brandenburger Tor, built in 1791 as a symbol of peace by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a tribute to peace, became iconic as a symbol of Berlin, important for the role it played as central rallying point for the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Siegesäule (Victory Column)- built 1864. I have another spectacular photo of my favorite traveling buddies and I, probably the best single photo the entire Berlin trip so far, and I'm not allowed to post it because they're all too self-conscious about their appearances despite there being absolutely no reason >_< They've promised me that we could take "better" photo that they all like, but knowing them, no photo will ever be good enough...so...we'll see :-)
Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)
Reichstag (German Captiol Building)
Madame Tussaud's
Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial)
On a boat tour of Berlin on the River Spree...
Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral)
Bundeskanzleramt (German Chancellery, essentially the equivalent "German White House", but apparently it's 10x bigger than the White House. And Angela Merkel doesn't actually live there, but she could if she wanted to :-) Thanks Wikipedia!
DDR (GDR) Museum
Checkpoint Charlie! (And yes, that is the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie)
Tomrrow we're planning on going souvenir shopping and to the Fernsehturm (TV Tower, a really tall cool tower). It might be hard to post tomorrow, and Thursday is just traveling back to Mindelheim most of the day, hopefully nothing to write home about. I'll definitely post Friday, though! We're going to go to Schloss Neuschwanstein (A crazy beautiful big castle that inspired the one in Disney) and my penpal, Lexi, is coming from her tiny town of Stadtroda four hours away from Mindelheim to visit for a couple days! I'll let you know how it goes ;-)
Liebe Grüße (Lovely greetings,)
Deine Megan
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