5 days in 5 paragraphs

This is a bird’s eye view of our time in Germany (Hamburg and Berlin) since it hasn’t been covered yet, with a few anecdotes that especially impressed me. Other people may come back and fill in more details of their own later. I hope they do. Otherwise it will be a shame as it was a really good time.
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1. We met some great people in Hamburg, including Jonas who we couch surfed with, who was part of a leftist movement and talked with us about that. Couch surfing was very cool. We also met some of his friends including a drifter girl who had been through Sydney, India, and all over Europe busking, selling chalk art, and living in a treehouse in the jungle. She had some pretty cool stories to tell. Not to mention an investment banker from Munich who told us all about how America’s crazy propensity to borrow beyond our means to repay were screwing us over. It was also really cool to live in a residential rather than tourist part of town and see more what normal life was like, and hang out with normal people about our age. It was communal style and we cooked and ate with the people, and it was great hanging out with them.

2. We also wandered around and found more of the alternative part of town, including some squatting areas and very cool graffiti. There was also a cool public park area where we hung out for a while and talked with some girls who were on a climbing wall. We rode a great ferry and hung out on a beach. And had lots of good food and beer. It was cool to have a more chill city with more downtime, although there were many beautiful sights too. My favorite was St. Nikolai’s Cathedral, which looked awesome in its own right, but was mostly bombed out in World War II and only partially reconstructed. I don’t really know how to describe it except that it was haunting and just very cool to see and walk around in, thinking about what it might have looked like before. It reminded me of a giant skeleton. I think Terry took some pictures.

3. Berlin was more hectic – we had a good train ride over including a good game of ghost and something else I don’t remember. Josh was doing a phone interview on the train and kept losing his phone connection which was unfortunate but pretty funny considering that it worked out okay I think. We had a room to ourselves at the hostel, which was nice. The first night the other guys went on a pub crawl while Jordan and I went to a Techno show. I think they had fun, they can talk about it or whatever. We had a great time with a cool venue. The first group was very industrial and dirty sounding, which was super cool and very German, while they sang over it. They didn’t do anything really except sing over their tracks which were almost entirely prerecorded, but they had a friend in a full spandex body suit and red mask who moshed in the crowd which was super inappropriate for the rest of the dancing so it was really funny. They kind of reminded me of the presets and had a cool look about them as well. We also further enjoyed being able to leave the venue, buy beer, drink it on the street and go back. What a weird law.. I felt like a delinquent the first couple of times I did it. The second band was technically a lot better, but they were more chill and downtempo so we enjoyed it less. We thought there was another group and then DJs playing, but apparently it was somewhere else or something, so everything ended at like 2 for us, which made me pretty sad. But whatever.

4. The next day we went on an epic walking tour all over Berlin, which was really great in finding out everything about the history of the city. It was pretty fascinating and our tour guide, from Dublin, was very entertaining, although it was 20% laughing at him and 80 with him, but no sweat.

5. There were a couple of cool looking girls on our tour who kept conversing in another language who asked John to take a picture of them at one point, and the other guys made funny faces behind them, which they laughed about. They hung around after the tour was over and ended up basically following us around for like 20 minutes, which kind of weirded us out (but not too badly since they were cute). We ended up talking with them and hanging out with them for a couple of hours, including walking through a museum (several in Berlin are free Thursday evenings) and getting dinner. They were Portuguese, and I think one of them was studying in Germany and spoke relatively good English, while her friend was visiting from Portugal and spoke less. Nice company and decent conversation, but we ended up splitting after dinner. We walked around some more but had to leave for the airport by like 11pm to head to Istanbul so it was a fairly uneventful night.
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The plane to Istanbul sucked. Cramped, uncomfortable, and it left at 3am. No one got much sleep or if they did it wasn’t refreshing at all. We got into the airport in Turkey around 7am local time.

But more on that later.

-jc