To Berlin And Back Again, Twice: Part Three

Read parts one and two, if you haven't. 


When I last left off, we had just discovered that there is an Ampelmann restaurant in Berlin. Oh, and since I neglected to mention it previously, I had called a friend of ours from the bus to Berlin and asked him to tell our roommates where we were, and told him what we were doing. He called us crazy, but we were a little sane in that we actually did tell someone where we were. And that is behavior I am condoning, unlike a lot of the stuff I or my friends have done!

Anyway, Ampelmann. The postcard had a map drawn on it, so after finding street signs (never easy in European cities, because generally they are nailed to the side of a building in some obscure place) and orienting ourselves, we set off. First, we passed people selling Russian/Communist souvenirs on tables on the sidewalk. Fur hats, those nesting dolls, you get the idea. And chunks of concrete that theoretically came from the Berlin wall, but if you gathered up all the pieces of the "Berlin Wall" that have been sold in the past twenty years, you'd end up with five walls. Apparently, though, judging from the souvenir business, Communism has become in some way retro-cool.

We then went down by the river, whatever river that is, I don't know, and passed the DDR museum--DDR as in Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or German Democratic Republic as we say in English, not as in Dance Dance Revolution. That explained the location of the Soviet souvenirs, I suppose, though I still find it a little bit weird. Then, we passed a bunch of guys, late teens or early twenties, who had obviously been and still were drinking heavily (no open container laws in Germany), one of them peeing on a wall.  "Entschuldigen, madchen!" Excuse me, girls! he yelled, as they all laughed. That is most definitely against the law in Germany, and I'm pretty sure you can be fined. Anyway, we continued on our way.

After doubling back a few times, we finally managed to find the Ampelmann restaurant. Sadly, it was less kitschy than we'd hoped; the signs on the bathroom doors, the umbrellas on the patio, and the names of the children's meals appeared to be some of the only Ampelmann-esque things in the place. They could most definitely have done a better job. It was otherwise a typical semi-Italian restaurant, and thus very disappointing. It was also located directly underneath the tracks of some train, the S-bahn I think, and as such rattled every time a train passed overhead.

Our food took forever and ever to come, and we entertained ourselves by creating a wax sculpture out of a partially melted, dripping candle on our table. We apparently have the maturity of five-year-olds, and no responsible adult to stop us from what we were doing.

When we finally left, Ampelmann promotional matchbooks in our bags (one of the more exciting features of the restaurant), we discovered something very interesting about public toilets in Berlin.

We cut through a riverside park to get back to the U-bahn station, and for some reason, I decided to stop and read the sign on the side of a coin-operated public bathroom. If you've ever been to pretty much any European city, you know the type: just a little box by the street that you put some coins into. I think it sprays some sort of antiseptic after each person, so it's pretty clean, I guess, most of the time, and a decent idea because you don't have to close them after a certain hour, like the public restrooms in an actual building downtown in the city I'm from.

Anyway, it was pretty typical, instructions on how where to put the money, etc., until I reached the part about a time limit.

Yes, a time limit, enforced on a bathroom.

Apparently, you get twenty minutes. If your business takes any longer than that, your naked butt is going to be exposed to passers-by. A warning sounds after nineteen minutes, and then the door automatically opens. If you're handicapped, and have whatever is used for validation of that (some sort of magnetic card, I think), you can extend that time to forty-five minutes. And then, no matter what, the door still opens and shows your ass to the street.

Isn't that exciting?

I'm posting this as a warning to you all: if you ever need to use a public bathroom in Berlin, watch your time! If it's going to take you longer than twenty minutes, I suggest finding a restaurant or something. Buying a sandwich to use the bathroom is worth it, if the alternative is having the door of the bathroom open up on to the street.

While wandering and people-watching, we remembered that the Holocaust memorial had some lights in the ground, and thought it might look cool with some of the rows lit from below at night. We headed back that way. The memorial, in case you don't know, looks like this:

You can wander in between the stone blocks, all varying heights, on paths that go up and down. It's pretty cool. Contemplative, and it makes for some neat pictures from within.

Anyway, we got to the memorial, and realized there were fewer lights that we'd realized. It was empty, as far as we could see, except for some people sitting and drinking on some of the shorter stones at the edges, but we ventured a little ways down a lighted row.

And then heard horrible screaming. And ran. As far out of the endless dark paths as we could.

After that, we just wandered the streets a bit, people-watching, and then went back to the hostel, where I had to sit in the lobby to charge my phone because I couldn't find an outlet in the dorm, and because we were sharing it with a girl who was asleep every time I saw her.

On our second and last day in Berlin, Sunday, we had to catch our bus back to Bremen around 3pm, I think. So we got up early to do what we could with that half-day.

It was nearing election time in Germany, and the various political parties were campaigning all around Potsdamer Platz. There was even a stage with live music going on, that I'm assuming had something to do with the various campaigns, but, as I don't speak German, I don't really know. We also saw parts of the Berlin wall in Potsdamer Platz, which was really interesting, a piece of history out on the street like that. There's so much more history in all of Europe than in the US, and it's so much more commonplace; the best example I've seen is the command center of D-Day, in London. It's now used as storage for some company, and there's not even a plaque explaining what it is. You just have to know. The only homage to its history is the name of the building; it's named after General Eisenhower.

I also gave in to a donut craving that day. I got a donut from a Dunkin Donuts. There is sadly no such thing as Krispy Kreme in Germany, and all the Dunkin Donuts I have ever seen there would be serious health code violations in the US. I picked the type of donut whose tray seemed to have the fewest bugs. It was one of those chocolate-iced, custard-filled ones, sadly mislabeled as creme filled, which I much prefer. It wasn't that good, either; Dunkin Donuts is always a disappointment to someone who knows the joy of Krispy Kreme! My Massachusetts-born best friend says my Krispy Kreme loyalty is due to my being a Southerner, but I say it's just good taste in donuts.

Anyway, after wandering the streets for awhile, we decided to visit the Berlin train station, the central station (the Hauptbahnhof). I like train stations, anywhere that has a lot of people coming and going, actually. Airports, too. They're nice for people-watching.

The Berlin Hauptbahnhof is not just a train station, though. Like all train stations, it has stores and restaurants in it, but in this case, it's like putting the Mall of America (where I've never been, but the point is, LOTS of stores and restaurants and stuff and it's just humongous) inside of a train station.

It's pretty enormous.

But the best part is, there's a Pizza Hut!

I'm not all that excited about Pizza Hut in the US, but it's definitely pretty amazing to find the stuff you love from home when you're thousands of miles away on another continent. In Germany, they mostly serve the crispy-crusted, probably way more authentic and Italian type of pizza. Nothing even attempting to be deep-dish Chicago or oily New York pizza, both of which, while of course less authentically Italian, are a thousand times better than any pizza in Germany.

And, okay, Pizza Hut's only just maybe a hundred times better than German pizza, rather than a thousand, but it was pretty amazing at that particular moment in time.

Sadly, after enjoying non-crispy pizza, it was time to head back to the outskirts of Berlin, to the bus station. There was a lot of the city we hadn't seen, but I'll see it someday; my second trip to Berlin, which you'll learn about in a future post, didn't really include any sightseeing. It was under much different circumstances than this spontaneous adventure.

But that's for part four of the stories of the times I went to Berlin.

To be continued....

Waffle House (A Blast From The Past)

This is something I posted on an old blog about a year ago. A lot has changed in the past year; I feel like a year ago, I'd experienced nothing in life, and since then, well, I've had a lot of life experiences. To remember that, I'm posting this, about the first time I ever went to what became a frequent hangout spot. Here you go:

I’d never been to Waffle House. I’d heard that it was smoky and dirty and “totally sketch,” to use the words of one friend, especially after midnight.

It was 12:30 AM, and my friend was driving me home from a birthday party, when I said, “Let’s go to Waffle House.”

Naturally, this suggestion was met with, “Why?” I answered, “Because it’s an experience. Because I want to have experiences. And going to Waffle House in the middle of the night is an experience. I’ll give you ten dollars. And buy you a hash brown.” And he loves hash browns, and needed gas money, so we set off for Waffle House.

When we walk in, it’s smoky and dirty and full of all kinds of people. The waitress who took our drink orders was all you can imagine: a middle aged woman with a smoke-tinged, southern accented voice, the kind of person you imagine might have a stereotypical waitress name, like “Flo,” and call you “honey,” and know your name if you come in often enough.

The guy who brought our food is young, possibly a little stoned, and with ridiculous hair. He has to keep his head sideways to keep it out of his eyes, and when he asks about the check he says, “Do you want to get together, or separate, or…whoa. Get together. That sounded wrong.” I stare for a minute. Stoned? Or just stupid? I can’t get a good look at his eyes; the hair, remember?

The people in the booth across from us are college-aged, a guy in a hoodie and a girl with a t-shirt with faded Hebrew writing across the front. Not too interesting, until someone who knew them comes in and says, “Wow, you guys have been here for like five hours.” Five hours on a Friday night at Waffle House…Interesting.

Over two booths in the corner, there is a sign that says, “non-smoking section. Every Waffle House in America has a Non-Smoking Section,” however, that’s very nominal. Most people in Waffle House smoke, and you’re not too protected from it by sitting in those two booths.

There is a “Did You Know…” trivia fact on the back of the receipt. It says that in the jukebox at every Waffle House, there are songs written just for Waffle House. One is about raisins in toast. I can’t come up with any change. Too bad. I’d have liked to hear those songs.

We stay in Waffle House for two and a half hours. Many people in Waffle House past 2AM seem to be intoxicated and/or crazy, but you’d be surprised at how many seemingly normal people are spending time in Waffle House in the middle of the night.

We talk about life. We talk about the future and our plans and ourselves. We tell silly stories and complain about how awkward it is when M and W, a couple, hang all over each other in public, and then can’t stand it anymore and go out to the car and we all pretend we don’t know what they’re doing in there. We talk about how all friendships are unbalanced equations; one person always cares more than the other. I’m always on the wrong side, the side that cares too much. I’m on the wrong side with our friendship, but it’s okay because we talk about it, and that makes it more okay somehow. We talk about everything. We watch people, from the group of women in fancy clothes to the gangster-types with bloodshot eyes. We wonder who puts Worcestershire sauce on what at Waffle House. We eat our hash brown and drink our cokes, and it’s an experience.

That’s what I want out of life: experiences. I want to sit at Waffle House for two and a half hours in the middle of the night. I want to get lost driving to the dollar movie theater at 10pm on a Tuesday. I want to shut my eyes, spin, pick a direction, get in the car, and go. I want to see where I end up, who I see, and what happens. I want to watch life happen in weird places. I want to find a hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran restaurant in a strange city.

That’s part of what I want from New York. I want to be in the city that never sleeps because the craziest things happen in the middle of the night. I want the experiences, and I hope that I can find someone to share them with. The friend in the Waffle House story is someone who is sometimes cooperative with my weird desires, but in a tolerant, indulgent way. I want somebody who wants to do these things as much as I do, not because I think anything specific will happen, but because I just want to see what might happen or what I might see or where I might end up. Is there anybody out there who’s  this crazy? After mulling it over, I’ve decided that there’s one person who might be: a fellow writer. Don’t we always want to people watch and see what stories come out of it? Don’t we always want to see new places and meet new characters? And don’t we always want to come home and write it down, like I’m doing now?

I can still feel the smoke in the back of my throat as I write this. I’m happy.

To Berlin And Back Again, Twice: Part Two

Part One can be found here.


The double-decker bus was not made for long journeys. From the looks of it, its original purpose had been sightseeing in some Danish city (all the labels on things like emergency exits were in Danish), and it had been repurposed for longer trips by adding a bathroom and a luggage hold on the lower deck. In the seat across from ours, a large woman snored loudly for the entirety of the trip, starting before we even left the station.

It was a largely uneventful journey, except for my trip to the bus's bathroom. This was a tiny, frightening bathroom, as any two-by-two-foot cubicle with a toilet on a moving bus would be. It was unique, though, in a couple of ways.

First, the buttons. There were three buttons in the bathroom: one next to the toilet-paper dispenser, and two next to the sink. From the placement, I almost assumed it was the button for flushing the toilet. Luckily, I looked a little more closely at the labels: this one was labelled in Danish and in English, and it said "STOP button. Do NOT press unless there is an emergency."

I don't know what that button stopped, but from the sound of it, it could have been the bus. I was just waiting for someone who didn't speak one of the languages on the label to press the button and bring us all to a screeching halt on the highway. As far as I know, it didn't happen, at least on that particular trip.

Second, the door. The bathroom door had a tendency to get stuck. I thought I was trapped in there for a good five minutes. It was rather claustrophobic.

Finally, though, we arrived at the bus station in Berlin. Or, rather, on its outskirts. At midnight. You see, the bus station was a good ten-minute walk from the nearest U-Bahn station, and it was not the most savory neighborhood I could have imagined. I mean, it's Germany, which isn't exactly known for high crime rates (that'd be the US, where, oddly, I'm more comfortable walking around at night), but abandoned convenience stores and sketchy car washes don't exactly scream "safe & wholesome" in any language.

So maybe arriving in the middle of the night wasn't the greatest idea ever. But, we made it to the station, and were then confronted by the ticket machine. We pressed the UK flag button for English, and were puzzled at the options we were given: "Reduced price ticket," and "Regular price ticket." With no further explanation. I assume the German screen had some explanation, or maybe Germans just automatically know which is which, but we did not. My friend speaks German, but she's not from Germany, so we were puzzled. We ended up purchasing the reduced price ticket, figuring maybe as students, we were eligible.

Which, we later discovered, is not true; reduced prices are for children and dogs. We are neither.

We also forgot to validate our tickets, as the train came into the station just as it was coming out of the machine. There are no ticket barriers to public transportation in Germany, just occasional spot-checks, with fines and even jail time if you fail to produce a validated ticket.

Speaking a foreign language and crying works rather well to get you out of it, and between the two of us, we had a couple of languages we could have employed (Kiswahili and Spanish), but luckily, on this trip, we didn't need to use those strategies.

We took the U-Bahn as far as we could toward the center of the city, and then got out at the Zoological Gardens (or whatever it is in German, I forget) station. There was a slightly sketchy internet-cafe-slash-convenience-store there, and we paid for half an hour, and sat down to research places to sleep.

Remember, it was already after midnight. We were also hungry. But first, beds. We jotted down a few addresses of nearby hostels, and hit the streets. In other parts of Germany, nothing's really open at night, but Berlin's a different story entirely; there were people on the streets! There were places other than bars and clubs that were actually open for business after midnight! I hadn't been anywhere other than a bar at night for quite some time, so I was pretty much ecstatic. I'm a night owl, and living in the US, I was used to middle-of-the-night trips to Waffle House with my friends, and I'd been pretty frustrated with the lack of non-bar nighttime hangout spots in Germany.

Anyway, we wandered around for a good half an hour before we found one of the places on our list. It was a little difficult to find, because it was located on top of a giant sex shop called the "World Of Erotic." For people who are so rule-oriented, Germany has a shocking amount of sex for Americans. Sex shops, nude calendars in regular bookshops, and so on.

Anyway, up above the World Of Erotic, we paid for our beds in a dorm room, found the room, and piled our non-valuable stuff on a pair of bunk beds. And then, we took to the streets yet again, at one AM.

We asked the people at the hostel which direction we should go in for places with food that were't Burger King, and were pointed down the street past the World Of Erotic. There was a cheap Chinese restaurant called China Box right next to it, but I'm not a huge fan of Chinese food, so we continued on, while discussing the naming patterns of Chinese restaurants.

"Have you ever noticed that ninety percent of Chinese restaurants follow the same naming pattern?" I asked.

"No, not really...."

"It's true. They start with the word 'China,' and then add some random noun. Random English noun, even in non-English-speaking countries."

This is a true fact, something I've observed in several countries. China Box, China Express, China Garden, China Sea, China Camp....the list goes on. My favorite, though, is China Buffet. Why? Because it reveals another universal truth about Chinese restaurants.

You see, in general, all-you-can-eat buffets are a pretty American concept. You don't find many of them in Europe. If you do, though, it's almost guaranteed to be a Chinese restaurant. Or occasionally Indian. I guess it's a business model that works for the Chinese-restaurant-owning community.

Anyway, back to Berlin. Eventually, we found a place, a bar/restaurant that showed no signs of closing up anytime soon. It was kind of a hole-in-the-wall, and we ate in a tiny back room with an interesting design: the door into the one-person-bathroom was right off the dining room. Which, in my opinion, is sucky feung-shui, but, anyway, it was the most affordable place we found.

It was a nice place, the kind of place where you could be a regular, and sit with a drink all night long, reading a book, and they wouldn't bother you. If I lived in Berlin, I think I might just become that sort of a regular. It was an interesting place for people-watching, too. Plus, they served American-style breakfast in the middle of the night! Just like home, where Waffle House is my midnight hangout.

We stayed there for an hour or so, I guess, and might have stayed longer, except we were pretty exhausted. So we made our way back to the World Of Erotic, and collapsed into bed.

The next day, we explored Berlin. We made it to the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial, the Berliner Dom, all nice sightseeing, got some cool pictures (which I don't have, again, for reasons I'll explain), and then discovered something awesome.

Ampelmann is German for the traffic signal men. You know, the green or red light-up figures telling you to walk or stay where you are, in case you are too dumb to just see if there's any traffic and then cross (very American mindset, let me tell you; random people will yell at you on the street in Germany for jaywalking, regardless of the traffic). In Berlin, you'll find two types of Ampelmann. One is the regular kind, and the other is the Communist kind, the type found in East Germany, and still visible in some places today. The Communist ones are awesome, as you can see here:

Image blatantly stolen from a Google Image search for "Berlin Ampelmann."

When we first saw them, across from the World Of Erotic, we thought they were awesome. It wasn't until later, though, that we discovered they had something of a cult following. And how did we discover this? By coming across a store near the Berliner Dom, a store that is the definition of awesome: The Ampelmann Store!!!!!

!!!!!!!!

Yeah. It needs that many exclamation points.

It may have been overpriced and gimmicky, but that doesn't diminish the awesome. There were t-shirts, books, pencils, keychains, everything Ampelmann that could could think of. I bought a keychain there, the start of my international keychains collection (currently standing at three, but it will grow!), in the shape of the green Ampelmann (yes, it needs to be capitalized; the Germans capitalize all their nouns).

As I was completing my purchase, I picked up an advertising postcard at the register, listing the several locations of the Ampelmann store in Berlin, and--wait for it--THE AMPELMANN RESTAURANT!!!!!

!!!!!!

It was immediately decided that this would be our dinner destination.

Up next in part three: the Ampelmann restaurant, Russian souvenirs, and indecent exposure.

My Best Friend, The Angry Driver (Or: The Tragic Death Of Shamu)

Since absolutely nothing interesting is happening in my life right now, at least not anything I want to share with the internet, and this blog is new, I'm probably going to be filling it with a lot of stories that have already happened. Since the most that's happening right now is, well, I have two days to decide what to do with my life, and I have no idea what the decision will be, so I'm ignoring it by developing an addiction to Bones. Which, by the way, is awesome. 

This is not my most interesting story, but it's on my mind tonight, so I'm going to tell it. I know it's crazy long, but I'd say it's pretty interesting, so please, read! Or at least skim.

There are a few interesting stories that go along with my best friend driving. We spent most of the past summer in her now-deceased car, Shamu (yeah, like the whale--she explained it by saying "it's big and blue," but I'm pretty sure the whale was not actually blue, as it was an orca), while our other best friend was traipsing around Europe with our gay-but-in-denial insensitive Canadian guy friend (the people I know are a cast of characters, you'll get to know them all eventually). There were late-night trips to Waffle House, wild parties, sketchy drug deals, picnics, camping trips, lots of Mexican food consumed--we had a pretty awesome summer, really.  Lots of stories to tell.

Anyway, I don't have a driver's license (ridiculous, I know), so she drove. If you met her outside of her car, you'd think she was a really easygoing person, with no temper to speak of, despite being a redhead. You wouldn't be able to imagine her screaming curse words at anyone. 

And then, if you got into her car, you'd stare at her, jaw practically on the floor, for the duration of the ride. 

If you think you know road rage, well, you don't know it coming from a tiny, innocent-seeming girl. She'll scream at anyone she thinks might have made the slightest mistake driving. I don't think the anger is helped by blasting Nickelback out of the car speakers, her favorite band, whose music, whenever I hear it, now just takes me back to her car on our way to our after-graduation celebration camping trip. 

Just picture it. The most innocent person you know, sweet and quiet and nice to everyone, screaming like the most foul-mouthed truck driver you can imagine. It's definitely a sight to see, if you're not used to it. 

Once, we were in Shamu, driving away from the high school, headed to Subway to get some sandwiches, and two kids were walking in the road. 

"Get out of the road, dumbasses!" she screamed. They got out of the road.

As we were waiting in line at Subway, the same two kids walked into the restaurant. Road rage can come back to bite you, can't it?

Sadly, Shamu died a tragic death, also known as the time we got into a car crash and then hiked a mile through the woods in the dark and I fell into a river. 

The story is this: a friend of mine from out of town, who had never been camping, never seen the mountains, came to visit. We decided the way to make her visit awesome would be to go camping. 

I think now is the time for nicknames. I don't know if I should be revealing the actual names of all my friends to the internet at large, so I'm going to come up with nicknames for the three other people central to this story. Since I don't feel particularly creative, I used the Random Word Generator to come up with three common nouns. The friend from out of town will be "Inspection." My best friend the driver will be "Enterprise." The other friend I'm about to introduce will be "Epic."

So, after Enterprise and I decided to take Inspection camping, we called Epic. We decided that three girls with little-to-no outdoorsy skills should not go camping in the wilderness alone. Epic was our other best friend's (who the word generator has dubbed "Loophole") boyfriend at the time (and pretty much through all of high school--this is the summer after high school, and they broke up after she went to college), and had become a friend of ours. He's a slacker and major pothead, but a nice guy, entertaining, and good at camping. So, anyway, we call up Epic, and he says, sure, he'll come camping with us. Since he's supposed to be at summer school (which he failed but he hadn't yet told his mom about the failure at the time of this story), we go to his house to get his tent, and have to lie to his mom about not knowing where he is, while he's lying down flat in the back seat of the car in the driveway (I am not condoning any of our behavior, okay? Don't get any ideas. We were not exactly role models for good behavior.). So, we get the tent from his house, a few sleeping bags and firewood from mine, and groceries from Ingles (local chain of grocery stores), and then Epic decides he needs to complete our camping supplies with marijuana. 

Again, I am not condoning anyone's behavior. Drugs are bad, okay? But, I'm telling a story, and I'll tell it honestly.

I never smoked pot, which surprises lots of people given who my friends are/were, but, I've never tried it; however, at this time, I had zero problems with my friends smoking it (I have mixed feelings now, but this is not a post about drugs). My friend from out of town, Inspection, had no experience at all with anyone doing anything even slightly not allowed, let alone doing illegal drugs. Epic had asked Enterprise and I if we minded him smoking on this camping trip, and we'd said no, but I'd forgotten to fully warn Inspection; I had forgotten that not everyone had my experience with and attitude towards drugs. I mean, in my mind, pot was barely a drug. Cigarettes are worse, in my opinion (then and now). 

So, we went to his friend (who doesn't need a name, I don't think) slash dealer's house. This is not a scary drug deal. This is a high school kid who sells pot to his friends. I mean, it got out of hand later and he was more of a legitimate drug dealer, but when this took place, he was just a high school kid selling pot to his friends out of a suburban neighborhood. Not scary, in my opinion. 

But for Inspection, this was a drug deal. Epic went in by himself, and we waited in the car. 

"Is he buying drugs in there?" asked Inspection, sounding freaked out. 

"Um. Yeah." Oops. I'd forgotten about Inspection being way more in line with the rules and the law than we were. "Do you mind too much?"

"Um....I guess not....It's interesting..."

"Have you never been around anything like this before?"

"No. Never. I mean, I guess I knew people did drugs, but I've never seen any before."

Apparently, I wreck people's innocence. This was not the first or last time. "I'm sorry about that, if I'd thought, I would have told him not to...I'm really sorry..."

"No, I don't mind...Are you guys going to smoke it, too?"

"No, not me, Enterprise maybe, but Epic's just a pothead, don't worry about it...I'm sorry!" I continued to apologize for quite some time.

Anyway, he got his weed, and we drove about an hour into the mountains, parked, and then hiked about a mile into the woods, to a campsite Epic knew. This involved crossing a river. The trail was rough, not too bad in the middle of the day, but lots of rocks and roots and such. This will become important. 

We set up camp. Well, Epic and Enterprise set up camp. Inspection and I tried to help. We are not outdoors-people. Inspection had never even been camping before. We built a fire. Epic smoked some weed. 

And then it was dinnertime. Rather than doing any sort of cooking, we had gotten sandwich-making supplies, string cheese, chocolate chip cookies, and some Cheese-Its. 

"We're eating the lunch of a third grader," remarked Enterprise. 

Yes, we were, and it was awesome. Epic ate four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It's called the munchies, people. He also drank half the beverages we'd packed, because we'd packed for girls, not a six foot tall pot-smoking guy. 

"I think we need more drinks," he said. 

"Yeah, we could head to the convenience store, about twenty minutes down the road....What do you say, Enterprise?" I asked. 

"Sure," she said. We hiked back to the parking lot, but left all our stuff and didn't bring flashlights--we didn't expect to be gone past dark. And, we were never that great at thinking ahead. Enterprise and I are sort of known for a lack of judgment. 

Anyway, we went to the convenience store, got a couple of canned drinks, and were driving back as the sun started to set over the mountains. We actually stopped to watch it for a few minutes; it was beautiful. We were alone on the road, and it was a beautiful evening. It wasn't quite dark yet, and we thought we could make it back to the campsite before it was totally dark. We weren't worried. 

Inspection and I were in the back seat, talking about something I don't remember now. Epic was in the passenger's seat, and, of course, Enterprise was driving. I was holding a can of diet coke, which I opened, and that's when it happened. We were way up in the mountains, with solid rock on one side of us, and a 200-foot drop straight down on the other. I don't remember anything except Epic yelling, "Turn the car! Turn the car!," and then blinding pain. Later, Enterprise told me what had happened: the back wheel of the car had slipped off the pavement (there's no shoulder on the road), she'd been going a little fast, and she overcorrected, sending the car towards the drop-off. In reacting to Epic yelling, she'd turned it back towards the rock face, and the car had slammed into it, spun around, and ended up with the back of the car against the rock. 

I hit my head twice, my forehead on the seat in front of me, and the top of my head on the roof (I was only wearing the lap-belt part of my seatbelt). I ended up bruised on my head, dazed for several hours afterwards (apparently I was repeating myself quite a lot; there are parts of this I don't remember clearly), and bruises from the seatbelt all over my stomach. 

After the impact, I was in so much pain I couldn't see for a minute or so. The first thing I heard was Epic yelling at us to get out of the car. I didn't know if it was going to catch on fire or roll off the mountain or what, so I stumbled out and right into a mud puddle. 

We spent the next few hours sitting on the side of the road, first waiting for emergency services to get there (we were in the middle of nowhere), then for the tow truck, and finally, when all that was done, a policeman drove us back to the parking lot near where we'd camped. Our injuries were minor; I was covered in bruises and had a headache for days afterwards (probably a mild concussion, and the ambulance should have looked at me, but they didn't), Epic was fine, Inspection had a couple of bruises, and Enterprise had been hit in the face by the airbag, and her face was all scraped up (she had a bloody nose immediately after the crash, and, since we had no tissues or anything, was covered in blood). 

Epic was the only calm one, really, probably due to the fact that he was high. We were all glad he was there, though; we would have been freaking out otherwise. 

Anyway, we got back to the trail in the middle of the night. While it wasn't a bad hike in the daylight, we had only a keychain-sized flashlight, and had to go single-file, holding on to each other, with Epic in the front. Aside from a few stumbles, we managed okay, until we got to the river crossing. This requires stepping from one small rock to the next, which is manageable in the daylight, but difficult, to say the least, at night. 

Of course, me being as clumsy as I am, I fell in, just as my feet were starting to dry from the mud puddle. 

So there we were. Back at the tent, covered in bruises and blood, mildly concussed, soaked to the skin, with no way of getting home the next day, and dead cell phones. 

And this is only the beginning of why it sucked. 

The next day, we packed up camp, and hiked, bruises and all, back to the parking lot. We sat on the sidewalk and waited, borrowing cell phones from other hikers when we could, calling various people, searching for a ride. I didn't call my parents, because I hadn't called them after the accident, and I figured telling them about it later rather than immediately would make them assume I was hiding something. To this day, they don't know about it. 

One of the people we got ahold of was Kate's dad, who had had to deal with the car being towed back to the city after the crash. He couldn't come get us, but we learned some sad news: our summer of freedom would have to come to an end. Shamu was dead, and could not be revived. 

That car was our freedom that summer. We went on a three-hour roadtrip to a zoo just because we could. We stayed out until all hours of the night. We did whatever we wanted to, because we had transportation. Alas, it was not to be. Shamu, who had carried us faithfully for two years, had passed. 

Anyway, after two or three hours of waiting, Epic's mom finally picked us up. Embarrassingly, our freshman English teacher had seen us waiting, as she'd been going hiking with her family, and we had to explain to her what was going on. I wasn't so much embarrassed, actually, but Enterprise was, having crashed her car for no good reason. Not that there's ever really a good reason for a car crash, but sometimes there are circumstances besides you not being the greatest driver in the world. 

We'd been lying in the sun, with no sunblock, and the three of us girls (two redheads, one very pale brunette) ended up completely roasted. Epic, with his apparently superior gene pool (he's pretty pale himself) was a little tanned. We were lobster-colored. I spent the next few days wearing a camisole without the straps because anything touching my shoulders caused agony, and taking a few too many prescription painkillers left over from when my mother hurt her hand. There were horrible blisters and I couldn't even take a shower or leave the house. It was pretty much awful. That, on top of the injuries from the car crash. The most painful week of my life. Oh, and did I mention that we had to help Enterprise's aunt move the next day?

Yeah. Moving furniture in that condition was NOT FUN. And we couldn't get any guys to come with us; Epic's mom wouldn't let him leave the house, and it wasn't until we were a few hours into the moving that we managed to get our friend Loophole's little brother to come and help us (little being relative, as he was sixteen). 

I'm not sure that Inspection will ever come visit me again after that; there was a car crash, much pain, drugs, manual labor, lying to my parents.....The only way it could have been worse was if that had been the weekend we slept in a parking lot in hundred-degree heat. But, that's a story for another time, and this one's been long enough. 

We mourned Shamu's death as the end of our adventures, but trust me, we ended up finding ways around it, after we recovered. And that, my friends and nonexistent readers, is the end of the story of the death of Shamu. 

To Berlin and Back Again, Twice: Part One

Note: when I started to type this up, I had no idea how long the story was, so I'll be posting this in installments. Probably three, maybe four, but no guarantees. Here's part one:


I've been to Berlin, Germany on two separate occasions. Despite my love of photography, I have no pictures of the city, for reasons that will become clear after I tell the story of the second time I went to Berlin.


My first trip to Berlin was spontaneous. I was sitting in my college dorm room in Bremen, Germany with a friend on Friday afternoon. We were both done with all of our classes, and trying to figure out what to do with the weekend ahead of us.


"We could go downtown tonight." That's what we did a lot of nights.


"We could go to Hamburg." Again, not too unusual; Hamburg wasn't too far away. We'd both been there before.


"We could go...somewhere else."


"Anywhere else."


An idea started to take root in my mind. "Pack your bags and meet me at the front door in ten minutes!" I said.


"Where are we going?" she asked.


"I don't know. Somewhere else."


This is my brand of adventure, one familiar to my friends, one that occasionally ends in disaster and often ends in awesome. My friend in this situation hadn't experienced many of my "adventures" yet; the word didn't have the same connotation that it does to my longtime friends who have been with me through midnight terror in the woods, trespassing on military property, breaking into Disnelyand, car crashes, wild parties, sleeping in parking lots, or shady drug deals (I wasn't the one driving the car or buying the drugs, though....all stories for another time!). So she said, "Okay."


And, ten minutes later (give or take ten minutes; she's a slow packer), we were out the door!


At the local train station, we met another friend--more of an acquaintance, really, I guess, we didn't know him well. But, we knew him well enough to get on the train downtown together, and discuss our weekend plans. He was on his way to Hamburg, and asked us where we were going with our bags packed. "Somewhere. We don't know yet." His English isn't the best--he's Spanish--and it took a few tries to communicate the idea that we were off on some unknown adventure, but upon finding out, he just laughed at our craziness--a better reaction, we were soon to find out, than we'd get from the Germans we encountered!


When we got off the train at Bremen's central station, or Hauptbahnhof in German, we decided that, if at all possible, we'd like to go somewhere warm--which, for a weekend trip, required a visit to the airport.


Sadly, once at the airport, we were met with confusion and disapproval. Ticket sales, we were told, ended twenty-four hours before a flight left. This isn't true online, we later discovered, but it was true at that airport, at that ticket counter.


So, it was back to the train station for us. This time, we decided to go to Hamburg, where we'd have more options for ongoing trains than we did in Bremen. We spent an hour and twenty minutes on the regional train (rather than the express train, which our student tickets didn't allow us to ride--we found that out the hard way, but it's a story for another time), excitedly discussing possibilities and discovering, over the course of the conversation, that I'd forgotten to bring toothpaste, and she'd forgotten to bring another pair of pants.


At the ticket window in the Hamburg train station, we encountered more bewilderment.


"Where do you want to go?"


"Anywhere."


"Yes, but where?"


"Anywhere. Where are the next trains going?"


Apparently, spontaneity is not a concept that's very familiar to Germans.


After several tries, we got times and prices for trains to three or four cities, but decided to try one more option: buses. It was already seven PM, but we'd see where we could go.


In Germany, there is no national bus company, no Greyhound equivalent. Train travel is the way to go there, and that's what's the norm, well-organized and efficient. After asking directions a few times, though, we found our way to a bus terminal, consisting of counters for several different companies. There seemed to be a lot of buses going to Poland, but we decided to stay closer than that, because of the already-late hour, and the fact that arriving in a place where neither of us spoke the language (she speaks German) in the early hours of the morning might not be the best idea in the world. My best friends at home would have been proud of me for having that much judgment!


At one counter, though, the next bus leaving was in fifteen minutes, to Berlin. There was a return trip on Sunday afternoon, and the price was half that of a last-minute train ticket to Berlin!


We bought our tickets, went outside, found the bus, and found our seats.


To be continued....