The Black Forest & Munich

After a busy week of 10+ hour work days (I have to drink coffee now) combined with evenings of beach volleyball, cooking for all my roommates, German board games, banking, a haircut, and a few bars, I had an awesome long weekend. I left work on Friday around noon and came back here where I met two of my roommates, Marius and Suman, along with one of their classmates, Carmen, and we piled in Marius' car, a small cabriolet convertible, and headed to the next town to pick up some groceries as we were heading to Marius' parents house outside the town of Neustadt in the Black Forest. We bought a lot of stuff and had to pile it on ourselves to fit it all in the car. It was only a 20-30 minute drive, and we were really in the Black Forest, I was impressed. We hung around for the afternoon, went for a walk and saw the amazing view in the pictures I'll hopefully be able to upload. We had a great barbeque as people showed up, and had a bonfire, guitar playing and singing, and lots of beer. It was starting to get light out as I went to bed, I think it was around 4:30am. I slept for a few short hours and somehow managed to wake up around ten after eight. I had to catch a train from the middle of town, a 10km drive away, at 8:35am. Thankfully another of my roommates at the party, Sascha, had agreed to drive me and was awake when I got up. I got to the platform with only few minutes to spare. I felt horrible and smelled like a campfire, but was happy I made it to the train. 

I slept for much of the first train ride, which was 2-3 hours long, and found out Danielle, a UNBer, was on the same train again as we were leaving, so we sat together on the next train from Ulm to Munich. The second train was an ICE (Intercity Express) train so it only stopped once which made it a fairly quick trip given the distance we went, so we arrived in Munich at 1:30pm. Turns out there was another UNBer on the second train, Carolann, so we found her in the train station and headed to the hostel but not before there was some shopping for Birkenstocks, I didn't buy anything the whole time in Munich except for beer and food. I meant to get some souvenirs, but has absolutely no room. We checked into the hostel and I was able to change and get cleaned up a bit since I had not been feeling too great. Danielle, Carolann, and I walked around a bit and planned to meet up with some others for supper later as they had arrived on Friday and were out visiting the concentration camp Dauschau. We saw a little bit of Munich on our short walk and had some ice cream that tasted like it had alcohol in it, not as good as it might sound. We met up with Breagh, her sister Danielle, and a friend, Keegan, that was just beginning a 4 month trip around Europe, and strangely enough I had met him at the Cellar, the pub at UNB, a couple of months ago. We had doner kebaps for supper, and set out to find some beer and wine as we only had 2 hours before the pub crawl was to begin. We finally found some cold beer (not an easy find in Germany) and got ready to go out for the night, Breagh and Danielle bought some awesome traditional Bavarian clothing, the Dirndl, to wear for the night. We ended up going to three different beer gardens on the pub crawl, and the one liter beers really hit me with the lack of sleep, so I don't remember everything too clearly, but I know I had a good time.

Saturday morning I had breakfast at the hostel and put the pieces together of the previous night, and also went to Starbucks for a second coffee, before a few us went on the walking tour of Munich like the one in Berlin. I think I liked the Munich tour even more than the Berlin one, we had another awesome tour guide and was incredibly knowledgeable. We saw and learned so much of Munich, it was crazy to think we were standing in the same place Hitler once stood. Below are the pictures of the tour.

After the tour we took a walk through the English Garden, a massive park in Munich, and came upon a field full of people with a crowd on the opposite side. We decided to walk though the many sunbathers, but there were way too many completely naked people we didn't make it to the other side, we turned around, nearly dying from the awkwardness. We made our way out of the garden, with a few more laughs, and ended up seeing the playing of the Glockenspeil, which doesn't sound all that great, I was more amused by the number of people recording it. We then headed to the Hofbrauhaus, the most famous and oldest beer house in Munich, for beer and supper. It was a great time and we had quite the crew as we met up with a bunch of the others. 

After we ate we headed back to the hostel, and we ended up partying in the hostel all night, playing drinking games, going to Burger King, meeting lots of other travelers, it was a great night. Monday morning we woke up and headed to the train station for the journey back, there were 6 of us travelling together and it ended up taking nearly 7 hours to get back as we bought cheaper tickets to save some money so we couldn't take the fast trains. It was an awesome weekend, definitely one that won't soon be forgotten, well the parts that I remember anyways!

Berlin!

I made it through the short 3 day work week and grabbed a train on Wednesday around 7:30pm to head to Stuttgart, where we'd be flying to Berlin from on Thursday morning. I met two other UNB students in the train station, Scott and Danielle, and we walked for 20-30 minutes to the hostel where we met 3 other UNB students, Greg, Carolann, and Sarah. I had never met any of these people before now, but they are all really nice and knew that the trip to Berlin would be a good one. We just hung out in the room for a while before going to sleep in the 4 bed room, which we had squeezed 6 people into. We got up around 6:45am and made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare. At the airport we met up with Breagh, the other UNB student going to Berlin. We had a short flight to Berlin, only about an hour, and we were able to all get seats close together. Upon arrival in Berlin we navigated our way to the downtown, which took about an hour, and a couple of trains. We made it to the Brandenburg Gate at about 12:50pm, just in time for the free walking tour we had planned to take at 1pm. The walking tour was incredible, it was way more than I expected. Our tour guide, Kim, was a former lawyer from Australia now studying history at university in Berlin, she was very enthusiastic and clearly loved giving these tours. I was amazed how much I learned about the history of Berlin, it is has quite a remarkable history. The weather was a bit overcast, and not super warm, but with a heavy backpack on I was glad it wasn't warm. Below are pictures, and the names of places if I can remember them, from the tour. (Also I think if you click on a picture you can view them much larger in a slideshow format)

The Brandenburg Gate

Hotel Adlon (Where Michael Jackson held his baby over the balcony)

The stones indicate the path of the Berlin Wall

The Reichstag

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The carpark under which Hilter's bunker lies

Remains of the Berlin Wall

Checkpoint Charlie

Location/memorial of the book burning of WWII

The Berlin Cathedral

The Old Museum

After the tour we headed to the hostel I had made a reservation for Wednesday night. It was located in what was formerly East Berlin, and the graffiti was quite impressive. 

Hostel X Berger

Kreuzberg Graffiti

The lady at the desk let us see the room before paying and it was actually better than I expected, I was glad I had improved over my previous hostel finding attempts (I booked a pretty sketchy place when we went to Belgium last year). I knew we would be in a 8 bed room, but I was told someone would be in the 8th bed but we lucked out and had the whole room to ourselves so we didn't have to worry about locking things up every time we went out. We went to an Italian restaurant nearby for supper, it was pretty good, although I think I have to stop getting pizza at every Italian place I go. We went back to the hostel and had a few drinks before setting out to find the pub crawl we had signed up for. To make a long story short, we confused Oranienstrasse, with Oranienbergerstrasse, so we were on the complete opposite side of Berlin, and Berlin is not a small place! We headed to the other side of Berlin thinking we would just go to some random bars. We asked a lady at the entrance to a bar near the train stop if she knew of this pub crawl and to our amazement she said they were at the bar next door. We went in, but there was no pub crawl. The bartender said they had been there and gave us directions to the next bar they were to visit. We walked a fair distance, and by a surprising number of prostitutes just standing on the side of the road, and we managed to find the bar, with some help from Google maps, and the pub crawl was there! I for one was amazed that we ever met up with them. We went to a number of other bars, and actually ended up not far from the hostel at the last bar as we took the train at some point during the pub crawl. We even went to a pub where you could pour your own beer, it was very unique, and a bit deceiving as we though the screens indicated the price, but they actually indicated the number of liters. Something 0,45 was not 45 cents but closer to something like 3 Euro. We got back to the hostel around 2:30am, and managed to get up around 10am. We had lunch at McDonalds and headed to the zoo. We spent the afternoon at the zoo and aquarium, below are a few pictures of the more exotic/cool animals we saw. 

After the zoo we went to a restaurant in the neighborhood the hostel is in that translates to chicken house. It was a very busy place, and reminded me of Swiss Chalet, it was really good. We then had some homemade ice cream from a small shop before returning to the hostel for a bit of a rest as most of us had pretty sore feet. Around 10 we got a few beer from a store and went for a walk around Berlin (drinking in public is the norm) we saw a few of the buildings all lit up, and headed back to the hostel around midnight. We got up at 4:30am and made it to the airport with lots of time to spare, so early we got 'Best Seat' seats on the plane that had a lot more leg room, it was great. I slept for most of the flight and we hung out in Stuttgart for a few hours before we got our trains back to our hometowns. I definitely plan to return to Stuttgart for a weekend as it is a very beautiful city and I didn't get to see too much of it. 

Typical Nazi style architecture, everything was over sized to make people feel small

Saturday night I went to a barbeque for a bit with two of my roommates, Marius and Suman, before meeting up with Vanessa and Christina and a few of their friends at the university tower where a large number of students were watching the Champions League final (soccer). It was very interesting to see these very enthusiastic fans, and there may have been a few too many shots of tequila involved. We then headed to the Express Gutale (sp?) the club in the train station, and I headed home around 2:30am as I was still pretty tired from getting up at 4:30 that morning. Today was a very lazy day, I did laundry and tried to figure out the next adventure! 

Here are a few group shots that I stole from Breagh and Danielle (hopefully they show up):

Drinking on the street, legally!

It was an awesome trip and I look forward to travelling with these people again, I think everyone had a good time!