Berlin, Prag und der Nordsee

I’m going to attempt to summarize my trip to Berlin and Prague the North Sea in one post because I feel like I need to move on or I’ll never be able to catch up to the present. I’ve started a Flikr account where I’ll put all of my pictures but I haven’t finished uploading so I’m not gonna post the link just yet. That being said, our Deutschkurs ended on 3 April and the semester didn’t begin until 14 April so we had week or so vacation and I went with my friends Danielle and Jesika to Berlin and Prague. Simon also rode with us to Berlin but he met other friends there. It took us a while to get out of the Alexanderplatz Bahnhof because we didn’t realize that our subway line didn’t run through there. Eventually we found our hostel which was ridiculous. We were tired from the 10-hour train ride on the Regionalbahn that we had to take with our discount ticket and I had less than two hours sleep the night before because I went to a club with some of the others after the bar. For some reason, we found everything hilarious and our “underwater”-themed room was hysterical. The hallways also had random paintings that Jesika properly described as the things nightmares are made of.

I walked us around Alexanderplatz and we saw all the important buildings there and then we sat in the Lustgarten in front of the Berliner Dom for a while until we were assaulted by a homeless Turkish woman and her children begging for money straight-up Slumdog Millionaire style.
We walked down to the Brandenburger Tor and I showed them the bricks marking where the Berlin Wall once stood. There were also a crap-load of happy BVB fans dancing around in their bright-yellow jerseys because Dortmund had just beat Herth Berlin who was at the top of the table at the time.
We headed over to the Holocaust Memorial and it was possibly even more breathtaking than I remembered it. It was dusk and we walked all the way through it and talked about it for a long while. We all decided that the guy who designed it was a genius and we hung out there for a while.
We wanted to go out that night so we found a club in Danielle’s travel book that played live jazz. We went down to the cellar and there was a band just getting ready to start. After a couple songs, the guy that introduced the band just broke out into unexpected tap-dancing and pretty soon there were tap-dancers coming out of the woodwork. Apparently everyone there besides us were tap-dances and they all did improv dances and duets which were awesome.
The second day we changed hostels and went to find the largest erotic museum in Europe. We ended up having to use the U-Bahn station for the zoo to go underneath a half marathon that was blocking anyone from crossing the Kudamm. The museum was awesome and it actually had a lot of historical value and thousands upon thousands of artifacts. I couldn’t get over how old some of that stuff.
We went to Checkpoint Charlie but Danielle and Jesika concurred with what I felt last year: that it was not as impressive as it was worked up to be and we decided to go find the East Side Gallery. The East Side Gallery is the longest remaining stretch of the wall still standing. It’s in the former GDR which was pretty run down and didn’t smell too good in the slightest. The wall was so cool though. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip and the artwork was really interesting.
We ended up back on Unter den Linden and found a big patch of daffodils around a tree and we sat down and talked for a long time. I think the three of us traveled really well together because we found it so natural to do stuff like that.
We went back to Wombats (our hostel) and went up to the bar and had a few drinks and a pizza. The whole trip was kinda done on a wing which is how I liked it; it kept it exciting. Zum beispiel: we didn’t book our train to Prague until after we check out of our Berlin hostel… We ended up taking an EC train which had super-awesome Hoggwarts Express-esque cabins. We went through Dresden and I got to see some of the bombed buildings on the outskirts of the town which excited me and the area around the city was really cool because it’s higher up in the mountains. I want to take a trip to Dresden now.
We got to Prague and discovered that the underground was much easier to navigate than Berlin’s and we found our hostel without complication (despite the fact that we couldn’t read any Czech). We had no money because they use Krowns instead of Euros so we walked to a shopping mall and found an ATM. We took out 3000Kr which turned out to be 150€. Everything in the Czech Republic was cheap (except for the ticket out of it) and that money lasted us for the whole trip pretty much. We had a traditional Czech meal at a really cool restaurant near our hostel. It was delicious and our waitress was really friendly and even with the liter of beer I drank, the total was still only the price of a small currywurst in Dortmund.
We discovered the bone church we wanted to see wasn’t really in Prague but about an hour and a half away. But then we discovered that a bus ticket there only cost the equivalent of 3.50€ so we went on quite an adventure to try to find the bus station and buy a ticket. Eventually we got to the town (Kutná Hora) which is now my favorite place on Earth. We had no idea where anything was and no map so we just started walking towards steeples. We found a handful of really amazing churches but none decorated with bones. Eventually we came across an Italian advertising his pizzeria and the back of his menu had a map and he gave us directions.

We walked the 5km to the Sedlec Ossuary (bone church) and though it was much smaller than I had anticipated, there is no way I could have prepared myself for what it was like to walk into the doors of a church decorated with the bones of over 40,000 human skeletons. It was cold and you were instantly seized by chills that did not originate because of the temperature.
Finger bones and arm bones of children were used to spell out scripture on the wall and on either side of the staircase leading down into the Ossuary was a huge chalice and in the center there was the entrance to a crypt that was closed to the public but above the crypt was a huge chandelier made entirely out of bones and included at least one of every bone in the human body. It was the most impressive and moving part of the trip for me and I could have stayed in there for hours just trying to take it all in.
We made it back to Prague for even cheaper than it took to get out there. We were staving so we headed back to our favorite restaurant and had another delicious meal. We also had a few drinks and some shots. We later discovered that it was customary to tip in the Czech Republic so we walked all the way back and gave our waitress a huge tip for all of her help for the last two days. We went into the inner city and discovered that the majority of Prague was not as sketchy as we initially thought. There was a really cool church and an Easter Fair in the town square. We also found the Astronomical Clock which was really awesome. We made note to go back the next day during the daytime to get better pictures and see the Easter Fair in operation.
The next morning we walked up the mountain to the Prague Castle which was a lot like a palace. We saw a cathedral, the changing of the guard, some of the embassies and a great panoramic view of the city from the top of the mountain. Unfortunately it began to rain and we headed back to the hostel where we took a nap and then headed back to the town square.


We had some traditional Czech pastries and drank
warm mead which was awesome. We saw the Astronomical Clock strike the hour which was quite a spectacle and walked down to Charles Bridge but it was under construction so it wasn’t that impressive. The road we took to get there however, had a hundred puppet shops and black-light theatres because puppetry is apparently the most important thing about Prague culture which is pretty interesting.
The next morning we checked out and went to go buy a ticket back to Dortmund but it was way more than we had anticipated so we just got one to Berlin since the train went through there anyway. In Berlin, however, we apparently got onto the wrong train because there was a late train that arrived on our platform at the time our was supposed to and we failed to match the number of the train to the number on the sign (something I always do now) and we rode towards the Baltic Sea (unknowingly) for two hours. We had to buy a ticket back to Berlin and then upgrade to expensive tickets to Dortmund because the only trains going that way by the time we got back were ICEs, so that was kinda frustrating but at least we made it home.
I got a few hours of sleep before I had to go straight back to the HBF (Hauptbahnhof = main train station) the next morning. I went to Duisburg to meet my Tante Isolde and Onkel Norbet. They took me with them to see their son Rüdiger (my eldest cousin) and his family. They live in Jever, a small town near the North Sea. We had a really cool trip and we went several times to the sea and once to the Naval Museum in Willhemshaven which was really cool. We spent Easter there and the next day was his daughter, Feylin’s fifth birthday. I had plenty of delicious, home-cooked food and it was a great trip.

On the way back to Dortmund, I had about an hour before my next umsteigen (train change) in Osnabrück so I walked down to a really cool church. They were having an Easter service because in Deutschland, Easter lasts from Saturday night, when everyone has a huge bonfire, to Monday night after church. I walked around inside the church and it smelled really good because of all the incense. I really liked it and exploring the city to find it. I made it back to Dortmund pretty late and went to bed because classes started the next day.
I'll post again soon on my first week of classes. Hope everyone back home is doing alright.