Germany Day 3

Even though I am now back home, I still feel it is important for me to update this blog on what happened the rest of the time in Germany. Basically, everything got too busy for me to be on the computer.

On our third day in Germany we left for a weekend trip in Berlin. We started out at 7:00 a.m. and took 4 trains to get to the city. It took a total of 4 1/2 hours to get there! We stayed in a youth hostel that the YMCA owns in Berlin. It is a location that the YMCA uses to host youth and leaders when they come into the city to do training and outreaches. The courtyard and entire atmosphere was very peaceful. It was like a place of refuge in the middle of a very busy and dark city.

We walked around Berlin for a while, stopping in small shops and markets. We ate at a chic restaurant called Oxymoron for lunch. The dining experience is very different over there. In the states, you have a waiter coming to your table every five minutes asking if you need anything, refilling glasses, clearing plates, and bringing the check as soon as you are finished. But in Germany, people take their sweet time. we were left to sit for a while, you only recieve a single serving of whatever you are drinking, and we waited patiently to finally get our check so we could leave. the differences stood out to Molly and I, but it wasn't unpleasant because we could sit in the beautiful weather, in a lovely courtyard and just enjoy that fact that we were in Europe.

The World Cup just concluded, but the Germany/Argentina match for the final four was going on on first day in Berlin. The city has a famous event for soccer matches such as this. In Berlin, an estimated 400,000 people gather on the "Fan Mile". They have pre-game events for the hours leading up to the game and probably 10 huge screens above the street every few hundred feet for people to watch the game. There were so many people there, and we were not even in the thick of the crowd. Germany won, 4-0 and we were glad to be fair-weather Germany fans. people were celebrating all night long!

We then went to the Reichstag, the House of German Parliament. We had an enlightening tour, in english! At the top of the Reichstag, there is a glass dome you can walk through and see the whole city. You can also listen to an audio tour describing the sights you see from the top of the dome.

The rest of the evening we spent walking around Berlin after we avoided a karaoke bar with "fightklub" written on the wall...oh our German adventures!