berlintag

According to the screen on the wall of this train, I'm traveling 160 km/h right now. I just transferred trains at Leipzig en route to Mainz (third last stop of my journey, aaah). I had a delicious and healthy breakfast of scooping up pesto our of a jar with a baguette, courtesy of my Hamburg hostel. I decided that because of my food getting stolen on the first day, I deserved to have my food karma balaced out, so I fed myself almost exclusively from the "free food" shelves. It went actually really well, and I took some stuff from there with me before I left. No regrets.

My day in Berlin was a little lame, mostly because of the brevity of my visit, which I expected. The trip happened because I got tired of Hamburg and I had one extra train ride on my Eurail card. So why not? So I woke up really early and caught a train out of Hamburg, which was 10 minutes late! Quite uncharacteristic of the Deutsch Bahn. My hostel was pretty cool, and had a theme of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

I was a room with a bunch of beds (the hostel was basically converted offices/apartments), but the windows were huge and we had a roof balcony:

So, what I did in Berlin... I saw some art at the KulturForum, but I was really sleepy and there wasn't really anything there that was especially new or interesting to me. The fashion photography/illustration exhibit was probably the best part of that (greg would have liked it). Then I meandered through Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburger Tor and the Jewish Memorial and Museum, both Famous Things:

And went to the Tiergarten, where I saw no Tieren, just Garten. It's a huge park. I was in a b&w photography mood for most of the day. The weather was very bipolar.

Realizing my immense hunger, I U-Bahned to Kreuzberg (Turkish center of Berlin). Tessa, the girl I met in Hamburg, suggested I go to one of the two weirdly famous fast food places on a certain street: a vegetarian kebap stand called Mustafa's, or an Imbiss called Curry 36. On the way, I passed an accordion trio doing an amazing rendition of Vivaldi's Winter. So awesome.

I had a craving for curry, but it turned out Curry 36 does not actually sell curry, just currywurst and stuff like that. I went to a Indian/Nepali (hi june) place nearby instead. I would have liked to wander around more, but it was really cold! It is so weird to be uncomfortably cold in AUGUST.

At the hostel, I got to my room to find that all the beds were taken! While I was waiting around for the manager guy to sort it out, I met a German guy (Yanick) and a British guy (Jamie). The story was that they met in Prague at their hostel and became such instant BFFs that Yanick changed his plans to go to Berlin and hang out with Jamie (awww). I hung out downstairs in the lounge with them later and we eventually accumulated Kayla (Austrailian), Laura and Elise (Irish) at our table. Interestingly, the rules for Kings seem to be more or less international! Obviously everyone plays a little differently, even just in Richmond, but it's fun to pick up alternative rules. We tried to Go Out later but it didn't work out. The night ended with me and Yanick and Jamie eating Nutella on white bread at some tiny corner market at 3:30 AM.

An hour and a half of sleep later, I was awakened at 5:30 AM by my other really obnoxious scumbag roommates. I have no idea how you can be okay with talking SO LOUDLY at such a ridiculous hour in a room that other people are paying to sleep in. The worst.

My trip to the Hauptbahnhof was very smooth, thanks to Phil, a Canadian boy who talked to me in the elevator at the U-Bahn station (we both had suitcases and obviously going to the train station). Shame we were going to different places because he was reeeeally cute (and nice to talk with, etc). Schade, immer schade! Scheiße.