Berlin was honestly one of the most interesting weekends I have had as of yet during my time here in Europe. We woke up early to catch the 6:57 train to Berlin. We rendezvoused at the tram stop next to the Vauban housing complex. Everyone made the 6:08 tram and we were on our way. Then about two stops down the line Eric realized that he had forgotten his Passport. He darts off the tram and as he steps out the door Chris tosses him his phone (Eric’s phone had fallen victim to a taxi the night before). The rest of the group made it to the train station, we had a nice McDonalds breakfast and casually made our way to platform number 1. All the while Eric was in a mad rush to make it back to the train station. Seeing as it was so early the tram only runs every 15 minutes or so, and it takes about 18 minutes on the tram to get from Vauban to the train station.
We waited on the platform… 6:35: the 3 tram goes by and no Eric, 6:45… no Eric. The train arrives and seeing as it is a high speed ICE train it only stops for about 3 minutes. We look up and see the last possible tram Eric could have taken arrive. We wait a moment and then like a bullet, we see Eric swim move, duck and dodge his was though the crowd to make the train with only one minute to spare. He had made it!
The train ride was not unlike any other ride. 5 of us sat in a 6 person cabin the entire way alone and the other 2 sat in another cabin. It was more than a 6 hour ride, but direct. Most of us slept, I discovered I could buy a wireless internet subscription, so I passed the time wandering though the world wide web. The train ended up getting delayed by an hour or so outside Berlin so I think we ended up in Berlin around 3:30. Germany had just lost to Serbia when we set foot in the divided capital. The festive World Cup mood had been abruptly deflated. This probably worked in our favor though, it would have been very stressful trying to navigate around the city to our hostel with thousands of people celebrating in the streets (and the subway).
Anyways we made it to our hostel, Wombat’s, with enough time to unpack and make our way to the restaurant and watch the USA game. We ended up tying, again. Exhausted from our all day trek, we decided to hang out at the Wombar (the hostel’s Bar) for the evening and watch the England game. The idea was that if we stayed in then we would be more likely to get up early and explore Berlin (this of course did not turn out to be the case.)
On Saturday we rolled out of bed bright and early around 11:00, ready to take on what the German capital had to offer us. We wandered around for about an hour looking for a restaurant listed in Lonely Planet. We finally gave up our search and sufficed for sushi and hot dogs.
From the random part of town we had found ourselves in we made our way towards the Brandenburg Gate. On the way we passed by a preserved portion of the Berlin Wall which had been turned into one
of Europe’s largest murals.
Upon our arrival at the gate we noticed there was some kind of festival, going on. There was a huge stage set up in front of the gate and some people were dressed up in, well let’s call it a “festive” manner. We had just walked in the middle of one of Europe’s largest St. Christopher Street festivals. It was Gay Pride day in Berlin. Now ordinarily a Gay pride parade is not something any of us would have sought out to partake in, but since we were there we had to explore. So we made our way past the stage, food stands and makeshift souvenir shops towards the staging area for the parade (on the way we also went by a very profound Soviet War Memorial). And by golly a parade it was. They didn’t have floats, they had rolling clubs. All the groups had semi trucks fitted with double-decker platforms. Each truck had its own DJ and about 100 people hanging off every which side of it, dancing and the like. We watched the parade go by for a while, and it truly was an interesting sight. I don’t think I will be attending another parade of this nature in the near future, but it was certainly and experience I will not soon forget.
After the parade we made it back to Wombat’s to get ready for the night. Berlin is supposed to have some of the best techno clubs in the world, so of course we didn’t want to miss out. We hung out in the Wombar for a while, watched some World Cup soccer, and eventually made our way towards a club that we had heard was fun and that we could probably get into (they’re tough on dress-code and the like). We took the U2 line for about 8 stops to the middle part of town, and began to make the 5 block walk to the club.
About 2 blocks away from our destination things turned a sour to say the least. I was walking in the back of the group and had missed a cross walk right of way. Most of the group was already across the street. I watched as a random Berliner with his girlfriend (about our age) lunged at Chris and muscled his shoulder in Chris’s chest. Chris pushed him off only to receive a heavy dose of pepper spray to the face. Confused and concerned by the altercation, Patrick walked up to try and pull the Berliner away from Chris. As he stepped around Chris to get a better angle on the guy, Patrick as well got a shot of pepper spray. Completely flabbergasted, Patrick shouted out, “Ahh… I’m blind! (insert any explicit word you’d like here)” With two men down crying and disoriented, Eric decided it was his turn to try and subdue the assailant. After pulling the guy away, he too was blinded with pepper spray (not without getting about 3 good hits on him though). We now had three blind mice. I jumped in the altercation briefly to pull the guys off each other, but in all honesty I stayed out of it as much as I could. The ordeal finally calmed down, the pepper spray had worn off and Katie had broken a pin in her watch.
Relieved, and flustered we walked the remaining 2 blocks to the club. About 100 yards from the entrance I heard sirens, a moment latter I could see the flashing blue lights reflecting of the rearview mirror of the car parked ahead of me. Three full sized Polize vans pulled up beside us. About 10 officers decked out in riot gear jumped out of the vans and had everyone move up against the wall. Somehow I slipped through the roundup so I sat on a barrier about 20 feet away. The police searched and questioned my friends. The girls told the story and identified our attacker.
It took about an hour in all for the witn
ess statements and report to be written up. After being released from the police we made our way back to the hostel. We got a good night’s rest and set out to see Berlin Sunday.
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