Tacky Berlin

Berlin is a funky city. After I got into the airport on Wednesday, we had to get to the hotel by ourselves form the airport which was an experience in and of itself. Thankfully, I picked up some people who were on my flights and arranged to meet a girl at the airport to get to the hotel with. We all had our maps out, trying to figure out the subway and busses as to get the least amount lost. One of the weirdest things is these are based on an honor code. You buy your ticket and validate it, so it gets stamped with the date and time, and certain tickets are good for a set period of time. There are no turnstyles or people checking your ticket. Instead there may be someone in plain clothes asking to see your ticket but that hasn't happened to us yet. If you get caught with no ticket or an invalid one, they said it is a 40 Euro fine but it is still honor code based. Why do I get the feeling that this would never fly in the US? There were explosions going on in the distance and we thought it was gunfire. Then we realized, this isn't America and there aren't any guns. Turns out Berlin was a giant wreck after NYE and there were fireworks littered on the ground all over the place. Since it was new years day, the city was shut down and there were no stores open. The hotel is interesting; I kicked the wooden bed frame at least three times in the first 10 minutes I was there, and there is a small glass wall on the side of the bathtub that is about a 2 feel long instead of a shower curtain so every you shower, the bathroom floor turns into a slip in slide. And there is a lot more slipping than sliding. 
Somehow I am still operating on less than 10 hours of sleep for the past three nights because sleep is for the weak obviously. I chose movies over sleep on the airplane and jet lag didn't make it any easier. They didn't even announce new years. Someone who was on British Airways said they all got free alcohol if they were over 18, meanwhile United just wished us a happy new year when we landed in Frankfurt. Not cool. The stern looking Russian man I was sitting next to didn't even fulfill any stereotypes and order vodka. Instead he ordered tea three times. Whats the fun in that?

The largest synagogue in Berlin in the old Jewish Quarter

Between two days, we have seen the old city, the old Jewish Quarter, a paintbrush factory that hid Jews during WWII (Otto Weidt's factory aka small time Schindler), the Holocaust memorial, the Brandenburg gate, the house that the Wannsee Conference took place in, the Reichstag, the 'Hippie' section of Berlin, the largest of the memorials to the fallen Russian soldiers that was erected after WWII, the German History Museum, and a whole lot more street art than anything else. Its all interesting and there are still three more full days in Berlin to do more stuff. Granted tomorrow is a free day so who knows where that will go. Sleep is probably unlikely at the rate that things have been going and drinking is shaping up to be a definite. We managed to explore enough of the city to find our way to some good restaurants and beer really is cheaper than water. I ate lunch today for half the price of a normal beer back in the states. We also chose the cheapest place in the market but I am going to consider that being smart instead of frugal.

Some of the street art outside of the Paintbrush factory

The Reichstag

The Assembly Chamber of the Reichstag and the dome that controls the heating for the room through air control (it was really cool)

The Holocaust memorial- more than 2,700 abstract boxes of different heights

The city itself is pretty decked out in lights and has all these tiny winter/christmas towns spread out that sell traditional German food and of course, beer and glukwine (sweet wine essentially). There was a giant snow slide that people were sledding down in the middle one of the main squares of the city that our hotel is only about 10 minutes walk away from. It had a little beer hall, lots of souvenir carts, christmas lights all over, and of course, none of the vendors spoke English so we had to order lunch by a mixture of pointing and other gestures. The main street that is the equivalent of 5th Avenue in NY has  lights on all the trees and lots of light up sculpture thingys all down the street from giant toy soldiers, the spelling of Berlin, and lots of other things that I can't remember because there are just too many of them. We were told to go to KaDeWe, which is a six story supermart with a massive international food bazaar on the sixth floor, and other store that is apparently the largest chocolate shop in the world. Only problem; we were walking around after dinner last night around 9pm and literally everything was closed. Nothing opened until around 12pm and was all closed around 8pm.

One of the booths from the Christmas village

Lights along the big shopping street 

Tonight we are all going out to dinner and the professor is paying for the food and all the drinks are going to be on us. The tour guide (who has been working with GMU for the past few years) wrote down a list of night life places for us to go because its a friday night and we don't have to get up before the sun tomorrow. I literally went down to breakfast and thought I had the wrong time because the sun wasn't up yet. Berlin is our busiest city because it is the largest city that we are going to by far, so we have been moving super quick. Touring from 8am to 5 or 6pm is a little brutal on the feet regardless of what shoes you are wearing. On a random note though, I got to try German bagels. They don't know what they are missing. They also put cream cheese on all of their sandwiches. There was a chicken or turkey bagel sandwich that had cream cheese on it. I got falafel on a bagel instead with the coolest mint tea ever, but the point being the bagels were weird.

The beers from dinner last night, all were 0.5L

The tea was literally mint leaves in hot water