Germany again! Berlin

Blog 1

Hallo everyone! Looks like I’ll be doing a blog again, seeing as this way I only need to write down what I’ve been up to once for everyone who keeps asking.

Before I left to go to school this semester, I spent a couple weeks at UBC in Vancouver and Carleton University in Ottawa. I had a great time at both places and visiting the universities there made me want to study somewhere else then Edmonton.  Looks like I found the right place, the city in Germany where I am studying, Marburg, is an awesome student city an hour or so north of Frankfurt. I won’t go on too much about the city and school here yet, as I’ll probably write about that in weeks to come. I will talk about the trip we just made to Berlin though.

Before this trip, I always said Berlin was my favorite city in the world I’ve ever been to (I was there last July for about 4 days). This trip did nothing but reinforce that idea in my head. I’ve told people before that no matter what you enjoy doing when you’re traveling or backpacking, I feel like you could stay busy doing that for a month in Berlin. I’m not usually overly interested in history, but the history of this city is so recent that many people that you meet can give first hand memoirs of what they witnessed over their lifetime. The fall of the Berlin-Wall was only a little over twenty years ago and they do an amazing job of telling the story. Seeing remaining parts of the wall, hearing about successful and failed escapes and all the other crazy stories that resulted from having a city walled in for decades. That was my favorite “history” aspect of my stay there, but you also see/learn an absolute ton about the world wars, third reich, Prussian empire and god knows what else. There are a ton of small little interesting things in the city as well. For example, on the drive in, you pass a old run-down grandstand that appears to be set up just to watch traffic go by. That portion of the road actually used to be part of a F1 track which was later shut down and moved further out of the city.

If you felt like partying for a month straight, I’m sure you would have no trouble doing that in Berlin. The first night we went out to a club that was in a huge warehouse by the river. These clubs often don’t open till midnight or later and stay open well into the next morning/day (up to 10am). This club had a typical disca/club on it’s main floor with a bar/dancefloor where we spent most of the night. Later on we found the techno/rave-like party they had going on in the deep basement. The music was pretty much so loud that you forgot you had the ability to hear anymore and pretty much the only lighting there was strobe lights. As my friend said the next day “ My friend with epilepsy would’ve died instantly down there”. Although this place definitely made you feel a little less sober, it was the best part of this club. This place also had a little sit down pub on one of the middle floors if you could find it, as the size of this place mixed with intoxication could make it difficult to find your way around. We ended up leaving at some time early in the next morning all happy with our night.

On one of the next nights, we started our night off at a super interesting wine-tasting bar in which you pay 2 euros to get your wine glass, which you fill yourself with the assorted wines at the bar, then pay what you feel the bar deserves when you leave. These are the types of places I feel I would never find back home in Canada or in the States… I love Berlin.

I’ll write down some of the things we did in Berlin over the next few days in no particular order:

-Toured the city seeing all the must see places= Brandenburg gate, Reichstag, Jewish Memorial, Berlin-Wall sites, museum island, the TV tower, Alexanderplatz and most other sites you have probably heard about in Berlin.

-Grabbed a couple beers and walked through this abandoned building that is now full of squatting artists which put their artwork on display. This place was very cool, all the windows were boarded up, staircases were covered in graffiti and posters and artists working right in front of you. A local German told us about this place.

-Walked around a district called Kreutzberg which is very “flea market-type” part of town.

-Went to the Sunday flea market

-Went over to Potsdam and saw much of the palaces which were remnants of the Prussian empire.

-More going out at night

-Stopped at a former Nazi prison, which was turned into a KGB prison during the cold war. The conditions were incredibly harsh for the KGB prison, which would near or even parallel those of the Nazi concentration camps in some cases.

I must be forgetting some other things, but I still feel like it would take absolutely forever to everything there is to do in Berlin. I don’t think you would ever leave that place thinking you did everything there is to do. It also had an amazing amount of “green-space” for a city that size.

Although this might not be the longest post, I’m quite tired now and am still settling in at my residence and getting things in order. I’ll try to post again soon with whatever I missed and a little more on my new “home” in Marburg., although it may take a while as I don’t have internet set up in my room yet.

On a quick side note, I will probably be making a short trip back to Canada in the next few weeks as I have an interview lined up at UofA for the dentistry program. It throws a big wrench into my plans, but I’m just hoping it turns out for the best. I am sure of one thing though, my sleep pattern will be absolutely destroyed in those few days of crossing 8 hours of time zones and then back as soon as I start to get over the initial jetlag.

I’ll also try to throw some pictures on here later as well.

Tchuss!