Bear-lin, Germany - August 5-6, 2009

Let me start by stating that Polish trains are little bit creeptacular. We met and shared a compartment with 2 seemingly normal Danish girls, but it seemed that the rest of the train was little "off". People were hanging their heads out the windows whilst they puffed on their cancer sticks, while others poured bottles of scotch down their throats. The staff didn't seem to mind as they were constantly bombarding OUR compartment while we tried to sleep. I think we got our tickets checked about 5 times (give or take), with each time getting progressively louder and more uncalled for "HAYYYYYYYY!!!!!! (insert Polish here) TICKETS!" O.M.G.



We arrived in Berlin bright and early, and made it swiftly to the hostel where we were able to store our luggage in the utmost clean and secure location - on a shelf. Deciding to partake in a free walking tour of the city, we photographically (yes, that's right) made our way to the Starbucks near the Brandenburg Gate. Being a lil' early, we grabbed our favourite German pastries and a coffee and proceeded to die just a little bit :)

The tour was wonderful, led by our Aussie guide, Katie. We saw all the main sites from the Holocaust Memorial to the pain-stakingly touristy Checkpoint Charlie. We did it all folks!

That evening, we made it back to our hostel only to meet George and Tim - some of the most outgoing people that we've ever met. The stories that we heard from these two would probably top most traveling stories, so if you're interested in any of them, just ask me and I'll let you know hahaha. Anyways, we cooked a lovely meal and decided to tour the German Parliament building afterwards... so off to the Reichstag we went. It's the most-visited parliamentary building in the world, so you can imagine that the queue was rather long.. oh well, we had time. Our dislike of Italian tourists was greatly increased in the queue as we were directly in front of an entire bus full of them. There was one point in the line where an Italian man's crotch was directly beside my face... but you'd have to know the whole story to understand why it was funny hahaha. Right April?

The tour was short and sweet with a lovely little audioguide in hand. Some attempts of taking photos at night were had and with only a train's night sleep in us from the night before, we retreated back to the hostel for some much-needed and well-deserved shuteye.

Day 2.

We started our second day by taking a long stroll all the way over to the East Side Gallery, the best part of the entire city! Along the way, we clearly got some pastries and coffee - we kind of fell in love with the pastries in Germany and considering this was going to be our last time in the country, we just had to have them.


We reached the ESG during a "rejuvenation" period. All of the murals were being repainted and updated in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down. The grassy banks along the river were so tempting, but we passed on our opportunity to rest and ventured along the wall to take photos and observe the art!

We meandered back to the city centre where we grabbed some take out that we enjoyed in the Tiergarten. We rested our tired feet for quite awhile whilst feasting upon our yummy lunches. The Tiergarten is a very natural park right in the middle of the city. Back in the day it was the hunting grounds for some fancy royal people.

The night arrived and consisted of us being chickens to go into the common kitchen for fear that we would encounter our Italian friends that we had met the night before. So instead, we had a couple drinks with our Australian friends in the lobby, and THEN made our dinner - at like 10pm hahaha. We ended up meeting a couple nice Argentinian boys in the process.

We laid our pretty heads to rest early that evening so that we could get up in time for our 8am flight to Stockholm. :) This is the point in our trip where our new umbrella had to stay behind (so sad).