April 13th- Old vs new

Plane rides are horrible, but trains? Well.. I'd exchange a 9 hour plane flight for an 12 hour train ride any time, any day. Despite that, its not the funnest thing sitting here for the majority of ones morning/afternoon, but if nothing else, it gives me an obscene amount of time to type up all of these entries that I have been slacking on. Forgive me if they're all just a bit of a mind spew, but it's kind of rough to spontaneously produce somewhat interesting and thought provoking word plays. It's OK, you can deal, it's my blog anyways.

For the first time, both of us were forced to split up on the train, as a girl who had a seat reserved booted me out of my chair (despite the plethora of openings about her, but hey, maybe she wanted to flirt with Ted... alas she didn't). I got the honor of sitting next to a crotchety old man, who stuck his nose into our little game of moving around "Read the seat, it's reserved!". How very astute!



By mid afternoon, we had arrived in the most historic city of Germany, Berlin. Home of the wall (now destroyed, except for a tiny portion, which we were unable to visit) and the great arc: Brandenburg Gate.



Our hotel had these: efficient power savers which requires you to insert your key card, otherwise no power for you.. they suck when you leave your laptop on and think it's charging while you're gone...

When compared to Munich, the citys are quite different. Where Munich decided to rebuild their old buildings after having them be destroyed, Berlin set out to replace nearly everything with brand new architecture. As a result, it's one of the most modern cities I've seen. It does still manage to retain a great deal of an older European style, but everything is quite fancy.

Well hellooo mr fancypants


With only a few hours to spare, we set off, first searching for a food place as we hadn't had a chance to eat much all day. We stumbled upon a food court cove, which was really the coolest food place ever. Nearly everything was under 5E, and it contained a kababery, Italian, Chinese, Subway and an ice cream shop. I knew Berlin was one of the cheapest big cities to live in, but I didn't know it was that cheap, cool. I decided to have a döner kabab (fatty meat cleaved off a big rotisserie, it wasn't bad, but it did kind of make me think of it as European McDonalds).

Better than a McChicken

Several blocks later, we made a stop at Checkpoint Charlie. Crawling once again with tourists (even being Easter Monday) we snapped a few photos of the area (without paying 1E to be with the fake military people) and set out. Too much to see in too little time!

Charl's checkpoint

The iron curtain looks a bit beat up

Crisscrossing throughout... well I suppose that's a poor choise of words, since they rebuilt new. This was one of the first cities that didn't have quite so many random winding roads. They were much more organized, and it gave the city a little more of a USA feeling to it, although it was still much nicer. They also had the most unique street light system (people with hats!). Apparently even after east Berlin was liberated, the people there wanted those to stay, and so they did!

They even have a themed restaurant

Lets try that again.. as we went straight down the main roads, we were able to see a great many beautiful buildings. Forgive me if I don't go into to much detail on these, I've just seen so many and it has begun to kind bleed together in my brain.



Near the end of our little excursion, we finally ran upon the Brandenburg Gate. It's pretty monstrous.
ayiiee, Godzilla


After snapping a few senior pictures, we continued on into the massive park behind it, the Tiergarten. This park is probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest park inside of a major city in central Europe. Of course, inside there was another biergarten, and we spent about an hour and a half enjoying being outside, in what was practically a big forest.



well... and we enjoyed a good beer.... Ted a little more so perhaps? XD



...You can watch the congress from the top

After a bit more meandering about the town, we decreed it was about time for a bit of shut eye, as it would be netherlands time on the morrow.