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....

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.

Traveling At Home

This is one of my favorite pages on the internet, something I keep bookmarked to look at when wherever I am starts to feel old and stale. I just wanted to share it with all of you, starting with this snippet:

Travel, I think, should not merely be the act of getting way the hell out there into the Himalayas or hitchhiking your way across Borneo. It can be that—but it can, and I would argue should, also be a way of seeing.

Read the rest here.

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.... 

Quotable Quotes

Collecting quotes is a hobby I picked up from Jordyn. I have to say, it's pretty addictive; I'm always scribbling something down, from a television show or website or book, in my notebook, a pocket-sized black Moleskine. In fact, that's my second quote notebook; I already filled a cool one from Paperblanks.


These are words I collect because they reveal truths, in words more eloquent than mine. They evoke feelings, or remind me of the way I want to live my life. They remind me of the spontaneity, joy, wanderlust, curiosity, passion, and creativity that I sometimes have, and always want to hold on to. The fundamental truths of how we want to live our lives are different for everyone, but a lot of mine are expressed nicely in various quotes. They're also just eloquent truths, independent from my values, words that touched me in some way. These are words that inspire people, or provoke thought--words that impact people, like I hope to write someday.


This could be a really long post, but I'll limit myself to ten of my favorite selections from my quote books. I hope you find something in here that means something to you.


"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain. 


"No place is boring if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film." -Robert Adams.  For me, that would be an empty memory card, but the heart of it's the same.


"All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost." -JRR Tolkein. 


"Sometimes, seizing the day isn't about yourself at all. It's about soaking in life's beautiful moments, even if they're not your own." -Slice of Lemon.


"I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way." -Carl Sandburg.


"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." -Maya Angelou. 


"Music's the only thing that makes sense anymore. Play it loud enough, it keeps the demons at bay." -Across the Universe (the movie, not the song).


"These are experiences I will never have in Montana. They are stories of a different place, a place I was walking away from. The emotions of that realization bubbled up inside me." -Jon Wick on Bootsnall.com.

"Listen, can you hear it? The music, I can hear it everywhere. In the wind, in the air, in the light. It's all around us. All you have to do is open yourself up." -August Rush.

"Relocating to another continent may not be what our heart desires, but I believe living life fearlessly is. It is fearlessness that allows us to forge the unknown, create new dreams and new possibilities, and confidently reinvent ourselves and our destinies. It is fearlessness that begs us to climb the mountain of 'impossible things.'" -Looking Glass Lane.

What are your favorite quotes?

This is a picture I took behind my high school this past spring. It feels forward-looking and somehow appropriate on this post.