"I Love You Baby!"....BERLIN!!

It's about 5:00pm on Wednesday evening here in Uppsala and I successfully travelled to Berlin and back this last weekend! I went with eight other people who are all from Chicago, so everyone kept joking about how it was the Chicago kids and me, but don't worry I represented Colorado quite well!!

Anyways, we spent the night in the airport on Wednesday night because our flight was super early on Thursday morning. After that experience, I can definitely say that sleeping in an airport to save money is overrated! My bed consisted of four wooden chairs pushed together, so needless to say none of us got much sleep that night. Our flight was only an hour-in-a-half and then it was about a 20 min train ride into Berlin from the airport, so we were all pretty exhausted by the time we got to the hostel. The hostel was nestled in a Turkish community in the city, so we had all sorts of kebap restaurants to choose from for food. We shared a 16 bed dorm room with a bunch of couches to hang out on in the common room. The people that worked there were extremely helpful in showing us how navigate the metro system (in a group of 9 people, this wasn't always the easiest task haha!)

Our room in the hostel!

So after settling in, we spent most of Thursday just walking around the city. Sense we were all exhausted from the night before, we ended up taking like a 3 hour nap and then headed out for the night! We wanted to keep the night low key, so we ended up going bowling of all places! This is where I tasted my first real German beer! Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it, but I know it started with a 'W' haha. 

I bowled two strikes right away so I was pretty excited!

Probably one of the funniest stories of the whole trip happened on our way back from bowling. We were on our way to the metro and were trying to figure out which train to get on to get back to the hostel. Out of the entire group, this older guy, I'd say like 50s or 60s comes up to me and wants to shake my hand. You could immediately tell that he was really drunk and had glitter all over his face so was most likely coming from somewhere shady?? Anyways, I'm trying to ignore him sense he's a creeper...we finally figure out which train to take, get on, and he follows me to my seat. He keeps asking to shake my hand, I realize he won't leave unless I do, so I shook it real quick and said hi. He was swaying back and forth and wouldn't leave us alone so we walked down a couple cars on the train to try and get away from him. He wasn't scary or anything, just wasted, so at this point we're all laughing a little. We were still waitin for the train to leave and I was pretty sure we'd gotten rid of him when all of sudden he appears in the doorway. So basically, he'd gotten off the train and then followed us on the outside. He was standing half in the door half out of it staring at me, then blows me a kiss, points directly at me, and slurs out 'I Love You Baby.' It's hard to describe how funny of a scene this was but we were all cracking up! He finally got off the train before it left and after that it became the running joke of the trip that I'd found myself a "sexy" German boyfriend haha!

We spent most of Friday taking a free walking tour of the city. The tour was AWESOME!! Our tour guide's name was Simon and he's originally from the UK. He knew so much about Berlin's history! I'm so glad we did this, otherwise we would have never seen nearly the amount of places that we did!

Simon, the tour guide!

Brandenburg Gate!

The most expensive hotel in Berlin, it costs $12,000 per night to stay in a presidential suite. This is also the hotel that Michael Jackson was staying in when he hung his baby out the window!!

The Holocaust Memorial...intentionally designed for everyone to interpret in their own way.

Cool pic at the Holocaust Memorial.

The Berlin Wall

Checkpoint Charlie (what it used to look like...)

What it looks like now...basically just a tourist attraction!

Humboldt University...where Albert Einstein studied before coming to the US!

Berlin's giant cathedral...there's no escaping religion in these cities!

After a long day touring the city, we decided to take the edge off with a beer...or two...ok maybe a few more sense we did a PUB CRAWL!! We went to 5 different pubs throughout the city and it was a blast!

We managed to wake up Saturday morning, pull ourselves together, and spent most of the day touring a concentration camp. The camp was located about a half hour (by train) outside of Berlin. When we got to the train station, we walked the same path that the victims did when they were brought to the camp. I'm really glad we did this tour! Even though it's a depressing subject for vacation, it's such a vital part of Germany's history. Overall the camp felt pretty eery. The stories that our tour guide told us about the camp's history and what went on behind it's walls are some of the saddest things I've ever heard. Not to be a downer, but just to give you an example, the camp is surrounded by electrical barbed wire charged at 300 Volts. Many of the victims got to the point where they wanted to commit suicide, so the most popular way of doing so was by throwing themselves at the fence. However, there's a 'neutral zone' in front of the fence warning all victims that they'd be shot if they stepped into it. So when a victim would attempt to commit suicide, the Nazi guards would shoot them as soon as they reached the neutral zone, but not kill them, just to injure them to make it harder to kill themselves against the fence. 

Too many stories exist just like this one. Most people wonder why anyone would want to go back to a concentration camp and relive its history. But with the way it's been preserved as a museum-like atmosphere, it's used as a learning tool so that we can learn from our history and never repeat its mistakes (something my history teachers have always told me, but I've never quite appreciated until now...)

The entrance to the camp. 

What they wore. Their clothes were designed to be too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Basically anything that would make them uncomfortable or humiliate them was done to them.

They were all assigned different colored triangles when they got there. The color of the triangle signified what 'type' of victim they were (i.e. criminal, homosexual, Jew, etc.) The Jews were given yellow triangles and treated the worst. 

At the end of the tour, our tour guide concluded with a poem and then reminded us to appreciate the fact that we get to leave the camp's gate and go back to our daily lives, something the victims of the holocaust never got to do. This was definitely a moment I'll never forget...

We got to leave the camp, the victims never did...

This experience was one I'll never forget. The weather was about 30 degrees F, so the tour itself was FREEZING! Even though the weather made the tour hard, I realized that it made me appreciate what we were learning even more. Knowing the victims were only given their uniform for warmth, while I was walking around bundled up in my warm clothes, scarf, gloves, and jacket really helped me recognize the reality of the awful conditions of the camp. 

So to move on from the depressing nature of the day, we headed back to Berlin, ate a hearty meal of good ol' German brats, and left to spend another night in the airport. Looking back on it, the trip overall was a great balance between history and drunkin fun haha! Definitely a very different feel from the chique culture of Paris, but AMAZING all the same...