Berlin: A city where you will find every type of person

June 22nd to 24th

Meghan and I arrived in Berlin in the middle of the afternoon, and as always, our first destination in the city was the hostel to drop off our stuff. In our room, we met a couple of guys from Australia who said they were probably going out that night and we could join if we wanted. We had also noticed a bunch of flyers for pub crawls in the reception area, and they weren't too expensive so we contemplated that too. But not quite up to anything yet, we decided to wander around the area we were staying in and then make our decision. So we wandered until we came across a little bar we decided to stop in at, where we had a drink and people watched. And let me tell you - there were some interesting people to watch. Berlin is home to everyone, fashion wise. You will see the cutely dressed ladies in their summer dresses to guys with a ridiculous amount of tattoos to people dressed in retro and every possibility in between. It was really cool just sitting there, watching the diversity. Then, deciding we were up to a night on the town, we headed back to the hostel to find the Aussies and figure out what the plan was for the night. And pub crawl it was!

Turns out there was quite a few people from our hostel who decided to out on the pub crawl. There was us, three Aussie guys, a couple Aussie girls, a couple guys from South Africa and a couple others. Made for a great group and one great night! It was raining when we left our hostel, so nobody was too excited about that, but by the time we got to the meeting point for thr pub the rain had stopped. Thank goodness! We went to three smaller pubs, and ended the night off in a club not far from our hostel, which was great since we were able to walk home.

The next day, Katri, a Finnish friend of Meghan's who is studying in Germany, met us for the day in Berlin. She acted as our tour guide and took us around some of the main tourist attractions of Berlin. We visited the Parliament Buildings, Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall gallery (where artists have painted murals on a piece of the wall), and another area of the Berlin Wall that has a bunch of the history written. Berlin, I must say, has quite the interesting history as it was so heavily involved in WWII,and what was really cool about the descriptions of the history that they put up was that they used individual people as examples to explain the history rather than just generalizing. In one part, it talks about a young girl who was only six years old (I think) who was disabled, and having been disabled she was murdered. Other parts of the info here talk about how some Jewish people had to leave their successful business simply because they were Jewish. It also talks about how the city was divided and the wall erected. Crazy history. But you don't see a lot of the history in Berlin, in the sense that it feels very modern. Since the city was bombed so much during the war, a huge proportion was ruined and had to be rebuilt. So you will stroll down the street and there will be one older building between many newer ones, or at least in some areas. Where we stayed it felt a bit older than downtown, which was cool. It's too bad that Berlin was so destroyed; being such an old city, it would probably have been quite the city now.

That night we went on another pub crawl with Katri. Another great night! And no rain this time. Rather, it had rained earlier in the day. We went on a different pub crawl this time, but ended up at some of the same places as the previous night, and at the same nightclub so once again we were able to walk home.

So we partied until the middle of the night, went back to the hostel, slept for a few hours, then got up and headed off to our next city: Stuttgart!