Berlin: The pictures don't lie

At least not so far.

I guess I should explain.  See, I didn't really ever think about it before, but most pictures I've seen of Berlin are either black and white or show gloomy gray weather.  And when we got to Berlin, it was just that: gloomy and gray, with lots of brick walls and graffiti and factory roofs and rail lines.

Not that I'm bothered by that.  Good grief, I'm from L.A.  Seems like I wouldn't have any problem with a huge city full of graffiti, industry, and dirt.  But somehow in my mind, I guess I had pictured something different.  So after my first weekend in Berlin, I'm not quite sure yet whether I like it very much.  I think I could grow to like it, but my first impression wasn't what I had anticipated.

***WARNING - EXTREMELY LONG POST!!!***
Apologies in advance.  But there's a (hopefully) good story at the end.

Basic rundown of the weekend was:
Friday

• 3 pm: Met at Hamburg ZOB (central bus station).  Super excited because Ninni, one of the Finnish girls I bowled with, was going on the trip.  We sat together.
• 6:30 pm: Got to Berlin and went to the hostel, which was on the east side.  Ninni and I decided to room with Rita and Fanni, two Hungarian girls who were sitting near us on the bus, because none of us wanted crazy roommates.
• 8:30 pm: Had dinner at a pizza place around the corner from the hostel.  We filled the whole place!  I sat with three other girls who were also from a mediterranean climate--Greece, Croatia, and Turkey--so it was ironic that we were by the door where the cold draft was coming in!
• 10:00 pm: Hangout time at the hostel.
• 11:30 pm: A lot of the students went out to a club.  Ninni and I went to bed.

Saturday

• 8:30 am: Breakfast at the hostel.  Food wasn't gourmet or anything, but a good selection and there was plenty of it.
• 10:00 am: Met in hostel lobby and set off to the city center for our walking tour of Berlin.  It was very cold and windy!
• 11:00 am: Walking tour of central Berlin.  We started at Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, and then went on to the Holocaust Memorial, the site of Hitler's bunker where he committed suicide, the former Luftwaffe headquarters (which ironically still strikes fear into the hearts of citizens because it's now the tax office!), a section of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Gendarmenmarkt, ending at Bebelplatz.  There were a few coffee-shop stops in there too, because it was so cold!  Our tour guide was named Sophie.  She was a history major from Wales who has studied in Berlin the past four years, and she was great.
• 1:30 pm: Everybody went their separate ways to get lunch.  I took a quick peek inside St. Hedwig's Church (which is actually Catholic, not Protestant like most German churches) and then walked to Berliner Dom.  Didn't get to go inside--it was packed, and I think you had to take a tour.  After that, walked back up Under den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate and from there to the Reichstag building.  This part wasn't so fun.  Utter chaos on that street because it is the main tourist drag and tons of construction projects are currently going on.
• 3:00 pm: Met everyone in front of the Reichstag for our tour.  Had to go through a security checkpoint before entering.  It was as bad as airport security!  The only thing we didn't have to take off was our shoes.  But the tour was cool.  The building is very modern inside, and there are some really neat architectural features.  Our guide was good too--she was super professional and made an effort to help us understand the history and structure of the German government.  (Dad, I wished I could teleport you there with me--lots of interesting facts and rad architecture!)  We got to go up into the viewing dome on the roof at the end, which was awesome--360 degree views of the city!
• 6:00 pm: I opted out of a run to the Pergamonmuseum because I didn't have enough time to get there before it closed.  So I'll have to go back to Berlin at least one more time if I want to see the Ishtar Gate and the Pergamon Altar.  Ninni, Fanni, Rita, and I walked around for a while looking for food and coffee and finally stopped at a bakery.  Spinach-and-feta pizza was my choice . . . yes, I know, I had pizza two nights in a row. . .
• 8:00 pm: Went back to hostel.
• 9:00 pm: A bunch of us went out for dinner at a Turkish restaurant that was also close to the hostel.  I had roasted veggies, since I had already kind of had dinner at the cafe.
• 10:00 pm: Went back to hostel for bed.  I guess other people went out clubbing again . . . how they found the energy after a day in the cold and the wind, I have no clue.

Sunday

• 9:00 am: Breakfast in hostel.  Paid for a pack-your-own lunch so I wouldn't have to buy food later.
• 11:00 am: Tour of the Schloss Charlottenburg, which was the royal residence of multiple generations of the Prussian royal family.  It was really beautiful inside and out, totally my kind of thing, so I took way longer on the audio tour than everybody else.  Ninni was so nice--she claimed my coat and backpack for me and waited for me, because everyone else had already left!
• 2:00 pm: Parted ways with Ninni and went to catch the subway to the Gemäldegalerie, the art museum with all the old masters.  So cool!!!  I saw Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs, a few famous etchings by Dürer that were in a temporary exhibit, a bunch of works by Botticelli, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Eyck, and others, and The Glass of Wine and Young Woman With a Pearl Necklace by Jan Vermeer! (Mom, I wished, you could have been there for this one!)
• 5:00 pm: Left the museum to take the train back to the hostel to pick up my other bag.  I had booked a later bus and wasn't going home with the group because I had wanted more time at the museum.

Okay, so at this point I have to just tell the story, because it was so crazy.  See, one of the issues I had with Berlin was that it is SO much bigger than Hamburg, and I've already gotten used to a small train system that gets you from place to place really quickly.  Even though Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany next to Berlin, it is only 1/3 the size (with 1.8 million as opposed to 3.5 million in Berlin).  So Berlin is roughly the size of Los Angeles, and therefore it takes a LOT longer to get anywhere on the train.  The Hamburg and Berlin train maps are exactly the same size on paper, but their scale is WAY different.  Also, Berlin's train system is--pardon my poetic moment--as twisted as its history.  The subway tunnels literally feel like you're winding through some sinister and dangerous passageway to who knows where.  None of them go in a straight line, and none of them connect you directly from A to B.  To get from one end of the city to the other, you have to take the Ring, which is a train loop that goes in a sort of oval around the main part of the city.  The Ring not only goes slow, it has a lot of stops.  So east end to west end, or vice versa, will take you at least half an hour.  

All this to say: Being already used to the relatively speedy Hamburg train system, I failed to budget a full two hours of train time to get from the museum to the hostel on the east side, and then all the way back to the ZOB on the west side.  (It didn't help, of course, that our trip leaders booked a hostel on the exact opposite side of the city from the bus station.  That's like booking a hostel in Culver City when your bus is arriving in Watts.)  So by the time I got on the train from the hostel to get back to the ZOB, it was already after 6 and I knew there was no way I was going to make it to the bus before it left at 6:45.  The whole way I was praying like crazy, "Please, God, make the train go faster, or let my bus be delayed, or something!"  (Which, considering the overall slowness of the Berlin trains and the famed punctuality of German bus drivers, were both highly unlikely.)  I was freaking out because I had nowhere to stay that night, and the city was huge and really hard to navigate, and I didn't know anybody.  I was just praying that God would take care of me and help me find someplace to go if I didn't make my bus.

When the train stopped at Messe Nord after what felt like an eternity, I sprinted out the doors, along the platform, jammed up three flights of stairs, and ran, through the rain (because it was raining on top of everything else), to the ZOB on the next block.  I arrived, totally out of breath, with water spots making it impossible to see out of my glasses and my hair and clothes all askew, at 6:51 pm.

My bus was gone.

I was trying so hard not to freak out, but I was freaking out.  I went to the information desk and tried to ask if I could change bus tickets for a later bus.  I'm not sure I even made sense.  The lady at the desk was nice, though.  She told me to go to the desk for Meinfernbus, which was the agency I had booked with.  The lady at that desk was nice too.  She said, "To Hamburg?  Tonight?  Oh no, I don't think we have anymore--wait--yes!  There's one more bus leaving at 8:30 and it has one seat!  Here, let me change your ticket for you."

PRAISE THE LORD!!!
Seriously, for any of you reading this blog who are not Christians, I'm sorry if I freak you out right now, but PRAISE THE LORD JESUS IN HEAVEN!  He showed me sooooo much mercy at that instant.  I was almost stuck in a strange city in the rain with absolutely nowhere to go, and He got me a ticket home!  And to make it even more incredible, there were two other students about my age who came into the office immediately behind me who had missed the same bus and also needed to switch their tickets for Hamburg.  If I had come in thirty seconds later, that one seat would have been gone.  
The lady at the counter said, "You had so much luck.  That doesn't usually happen."  Let me just say right now, it was NOT luck.  It was God, 100 percent.

So once I had recovered from my near-heart attack, I sat down and ate my one dry roll and ancient carrot sticks along with some pretzels and a caramel-apple sucker, which were all I had left of my snacks.  (I hadn't had a real meal since breakfast, so I didn't care what it was as long as it was food.)  It was still cold and damp outside, so I bought some tea at the convenience store (I wouldn't trust anything else from there, it was as bad as a gas station store in the U.S.!).  My new bus came at 8:10, and it was a really clean bus with comfy seats and decent leg room.  The girl I sat next to was really nice too.  It took exactly 3 hours to get back to Hamburg.  The ride itself was quiet and kind of boring, but I wasn't bored.  I was perfectly content to sit and watch the arrow move on the driver's road progress map screen.  All I could think of was how glad I was to be in a warm, dry, comfortable seat on the way back home.  (After Berlin, Hamburg really did feel like home to me.)  I probably said a thank-you prayer to God about 50 times over the course of the ride.  

We rolled into Hamburg about 11:45.  I got off the train at Saarlandstraße exactly at midnight, and I was back in my room at Georgi-Haus by 12:15.

So . . . yeah.  God was really looking out for me on that one!

Needless to say, that alone made my first time in Berlin slightly traumatic.  But I did learn three very important travel lessons from it:
1) When in Berlin--or any big city, for that matter--always allow more time for public transportation than you think you will need, and plan to arrive plenty early for any buses or trains to other cities!
2) No matter how cool a museum is, don't jeopardize your trip home in order to stay at the museum longer!
3) Don't book a hostel on the opposite end of the city from the bus or train station.

That was the big story. . . you can finally stop reading!  (Is anybody still reading at this point?)  More highlights from Berlin (the fun stuff) and pictures coming tomorrow!