Our Day in the Fatherland

We are only in Berlin for roughly 47 hours -- not even two full days, so this was our one and only day to fit in all of the sights and sounds of Germany!

Having had success with the hop on/hop off bus in Paris, we decided that this would be the best/most efficient way for us to see everything we had on our list and boy, were we wrong! Before I continue, you can all rest easy knowing that Whitney and I have now seen everything we wanted to (we'll be taking a little excursion tomorrow morning before we depart, but it will be to see something that wasn't included in our original itinerary) and that we are happily sitting in our hostel's lounge getting ready for dinner and the US/Germany football game, but I would not take the bus if I was coming back.

First of all, the stop closest to us was a square called Alexanderplatz (or just "Alex" if you're a Berliner). My tour book describes this area as "desolate" and it was... so why is a tourism company taking people here?! Every hop on/hop off bus we saw made this same stop, but still! Desolate.

While the upper deck of the bus we'd taken in Paris didn't have windows, this one did, which prevented a lot of picture taking, but the bus prevented actual tourism. It skipped two stops -- these were also the first two stops Whitney and I had planned on visiting, go figure -- without any explanation and would stay at stops for 20 minutes! Finally, Whitney and I went down and asked why we'd skipped those stops and were told that it was a FIFA thing and that we should have gotten off at the stop before; we would have been happy to do this IF WE HAD KNOWN. At this point, we swapped buses, choosing to ride with the same company (not that we had a choice after spending our money on this tour), but a different driver because ours was incompetent.

We ended up getting off at the next stop anyways -- not because we wanted to see anything there, but because we saw that the bank we could use without getting any international ATM fees was right across the street. After further depleting our already sad bank accounts, we ended up visiting what we were told was Berlin's equivalent of Harrod's: Kaufhaus des Westens, affectionately referred to by the natives as KaDeWe. We'd been told that we had to visit their sixth floor -- the food market -- so that was where we went. Whit immediately found a pastry to try, but I didn't buy anything German; instead I bought something South African! Last year in SA, I had a hard cider called Savannah Dry but they don't sell it in the States, so when I saw it here, I obviously had to buy a few bottles! Duh, no brainer. This was a brilliant idea except that it meant carrying around several glass bottles for the rest of the day. Oops.

It'll be worth it later tonight though.

We got bockwurst and currywurst for lunch so we've officially done the sausage thing.

We returned to our bus at this point and went on to Checkpoint Charlie -- one of the best known border crossing between East and West Berlin -- and realized once again that we are not mature enough to be world travelers because we made a lot of Spongebob jokes...

East? I thought you said Weest.

After that, we circled back around and got off at Alexanderplatz again so we could drop off our bottles at the hostel. It was at this point that we bought strawberries from a strawberry shaped stand.

You should know by now that I don't joke about food.

After that, we returned to the bus so we could get off at the "correct spot" for the destinations we'd missed before -- The Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate, which were both lovely. Our main problem with the Brandenburg Gate was that it was covered in scaffolding as it has been temporarily converted into a viewing area for FIFA fans, so we didn't really get to see it in all of its glory. We decided that it would be safer to watch the game from our hostel tonight as we don't really want to be the two American girls in a sea of German soccer fans as the two countries face off. We were so "scared" of this scenario that we jokingly pretended to be Australian and Canadian as we were leaving and the Germans were congregating.

We walked back to our hostel from there because we weren't interested in taking another trip around the city on the bus and after such a full day, we're both a little dead to the world, but I'm sure we'll rally in time for the game!