Berlin Chill

Foreword:

Greetings again to you and yours from rainy ole Berlin City, Germany!!! Matthew and I have been having quite an interesting time here in lovely Berlin. Tons and tons of walking. I swear, if weight is not lost on this trip, I will cry. lol. No, this trip has been so much fun. Matthew and I fly back to the states on Tuesday July 1st.

We have enjoyed our time here so much, but we miss our families, home cooking, and just the normalty of American life.

Some things Matthew will miss: Laugen Bretzel (Pretzels), everything being really old and historical, Schnitzel, and good dark beer.

Some things Emily will miss: Brötchen (hard rolls), Milka Chocolate, (no not käse spatzel, I think I have finally worn myself out of that phase, bascially, eat eat until you can't eat it anymore, lol), using and improving my German skills, German ice cream, and the Deutsche Bahn railway system.

Some things Matthew will not miss: not having ice, not having free water, not having refills, not being able to have as much ketchup as he wants for free, having free choices for drinks instead of having to have beer with every meal because it is the cheapest option, plain sparkling water.

Some things Emily will not miss: not having ice, not having free water, not having refills, not being able to have as much ketchup as he wants for free, having free choices for drinks instead of having to have beer with every meal because it is the cheapest option, plain sparkling water.(lol, look at how American we are). lol. While some of these things may sound silly, they are the truth. You have to pay for condiments, of which you only get one small package. There are no free refills. You have to pay for water, and most water is carbonated. We are quite homesick at the moment and really longing for home and the ones we love. It has been tons of fun, but it is time to head on home!!!!

06-28-08 Chill Day

Well, today was a very chill day. I had tried to plan a bunch of things that we could do, but guess what? It rained basically all day, lovely isn't it. We decided to sleep in today, since all of our days have been early and fairly packed full of things to do. We slept in till about 10 am, and then we decided to get ready and check out since check out is at 11am. Matt, Tyler, and I had planned to go to the Berliner Dom and Charlottenburg. Well, neither of those two things happened. After check out, we were pretty hungry, so we decided to grab some cheap food from an imbiss. We all had curry wurst and Matthew and I each had a small pommes (french fries) with it. The food was alright and there was enough to constitiute 3.50? for lunch.

We were on our way to Charlottenburg, when I decided that we should go to the zoo tomorrow and with our Berlin cards, we get 25% off the entrance fee. I wanted to check out how much it would cost and how much we would get off, to even see if it was worth it. Well it is about 12? for an adult, 9? for a student, and we would get 25% of a normal adult ticket. I think it acutally works out cheaper to do the student ticket, so I believe we will do that instead and spend the whole day at the Berlin zoo. After the price check, we had seen a flee market on our way to the zoo, so we decided to hitch back a stop on the subway to check out this awesome flee market.

While we were waiting for the s-bahn (subway), there was a man in liek a white body suit, with sprayed pink hair with white closepins in his hair, and then one half of his body covered with pink closepins and the other with blue close pins. The front of the suit was open to expose this man's chest. It was awkward, but funny as hell. We couldn't stop laughing silently to ourselves and we took a picture of him. This man had to be in his late 40's early 50's. I still don't know what to think of it, and to top it all off, he was wearing a pair of bright pink loafers. Finally after many trains had come gone and had problems, we finally found one that would take us to the place where we wanted to go. When I talk about this flee market, you just have to imagine like a side street completely filled with personal verndors. We spent at least a good hour and a half there. I spent 20? I bought a pair of old Opera glasses for the Opera tonight and a gift... (oooo... who's it for????)

Anyways, the flee market was huge, there were probably around 100 some vendors. It was bascially an antiques market and I swear, had it been in the states and I would have been able to transport stuff home safely, I would have bough thalf of it up! At the Flee market, there was a crepe stand and I had to give way into having a Nutella crepe. It was so tasty and worth every penny of the 2?'s I paid for it!!! YUM!!! After the flee market,Berlin was just soaked, it had been raining hard core the whole time. We considered still going to the Charlottenburg palace, but none of us really felt we could afford the entrance fee, so then we thought we might do the grounds, but after all that rain, the grounds would have been complete mud. It would have been miserable to say the least.

We thought still about going to the Dom, but I mentioned that there was also an entrance fee for that, and so we all decided that some things needed to be saved for the next Berlin trip, so we went back to the zoologischer garten stop and foudn a grocery store by complete chance. Let me preface this by saying that Berlin is extremely expensive. I had forgotten how much so. This grocery store was like such a wonderful relief.

We all decided to buy dinenr there. Matt and I both got a 1.5 liter of apfelschorel (basically, carbonated appel juice), a thing of 4 puddings, and a bag of peanut flips or in Matt's case a bag of paprika chips, all for 2.38?. That is the cheapest meal we have had here so far!!!! We are so going there tomorrow. Usually on sundays in Germany, everything is closed including grocery stores, however, this grocery store is open tomorrow, so when we go to the zoo, before hand we are goign to the grocery store, stocking up for food on the day, and bringing it into the zoo with us. We are quite pleased with ourselves and our stroke of genius that we will now be getting a ton of food, for very little cash! BOOYAH! We decided to eat our lunch\dinner outside of the Lipstick, powder, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedenknis kirche. We found one bench that was not completely soaked, ate some food, went into the Kaiser building again and went into the powder church again.

We were going to go back to Ka De We, but Matthew and I were draining and so Tyler went by himself while Matthew and I went back to teh Hostel to check in, shower, and get ready for the opera. We got ready fairly quickly and decided that since we were ready with over and hour and a half before show time, that we should spend some time on the internet, so thats what we are doing. It is pre-opera time right now, we are both in black. I am waring a black dress with a black over lay and the 3? shoes that I bought in Köln (Cologne). Matthew is wearing a Short sleeve, black button up shirt that we bought him the other day at H & M for this Opera, since there is a dress code. (We might return it after we are done, we'll see, we were just desperate for him to have something to wear).

Now it is time for us to leave, but not to worry, I will update the rest of the night once we get back!!! Lots of Love, Biss Dann!