Germania Day 1

This method seemed to work last time, so I'm going to again do a post for each day that I was in Germany.  Hope you all had a good weekend, and are ready to read! So I arrived in Germany on Friday at 10:30, after leaving Rome at 6:30 and took to the streets ready to run. Couple things I noticed immediately upon arriving in Germany.

1. People were bigger. Both wider and taller. Italians are small by nature (I'm taller than almost every Italian I've met), but the Germans and those visiting in Berlin were all bigger folk. Also, blond becomes the most common hair color, instead of the brown or black found in Italy. One more note; they go hard, all the time. I got on the subway at 11, and there was two or three groups of people, all ages, with open alcohol on the train. I'm all for TGIF and all that, but 11 am on a Friday is still part of the work week. Austin informed me, when I mentioned this to him, that those groups may just be getting home from the clubs from the night before. Woah

2. Germans are obedient. I came to a crosswalk, and there was a little red man light stating no one should cross. There was nothing coming. I waited, with the crowd, the first time this happened. When we got to the next red man, with nothing coming, I decided that I am an American coming from Italy, and I'll be damned if I stand at a crosswalk for waiting for the green light. Everyone else seemed content to wait 2,3,10 minutes, or until the green man appeared. They would still be standing at that light if it was red. Ain't nobody got time for that! I proceeded to jay walk all over Berlin, but I can write that off as being an idiot American.

3. The Berlin public transportation is ridiculous. They have so many subways, that they had to go to different shades of blue. They had red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, brown, and then needed more so made an orangish redish, a pinkish redish, a dark blue, a light blue, a lighter purple and so on and so forth. This would all be well and good if the city was the size of Maine. It's not. To give you an idea, Rome has two main train lines, and 8 regional trains that run out. Think of the two main lines forming a circle, and then the 8 regionals shooting off from that wheel to feed the towns around Rome. Berlin has 28 train routes. Like Rome, they have a ring around the city (A zone) which is the main part of Berlin, aka anywhere a tourist might ever want to see. To walk from one end to the other of Rome's main zone, it would take an hour and a half. To walk from one end of Berlin's main zone to the other would take an hour and 15. For all intents and purposes, you could walk from one end of Rome to the other and one end of Berlin to the other in the same time. Rome survives with 10 trains to kind of cover that area. Berlin makes do with 28. Still, despite this veritable web of connections, we wound up taking a taxi multiple times during the weekend because a train didn't reach where we were, or the train would be too slow for us to reach places on time. I was looking for directions to somewhere, which was about a 10 minute walk away. When I asked a German for directions, they pointed to the bus stop, and told me to take the 102 bus for four stops. In Rome, an Italian is going to point and tell you to just start marching that way, in Germany they'll tell you to wait for official transport. Different cultures. Below find a map of the subway of Berlin (or follow the link

On to the narrative of the weekend and off of the rant against the German public transit. So I arrived to Berlin and went to find Austin, my roommate from ND and one of my best friends, at his office, so I could drop off my luggage. Found him, after taking a bus than a train and we had lunch. We had doner for lunch, which is basically a hunk of pork, which is slow roasting on a spit that is sliced up and served in a burrito with lettuce and onions and stuff. The Europeans call them kebabs, and the German one was pretty good. After that, he went back to work and I was left to go exploring. Now I, foolishly, had thought I would have access to my phone while in Germany. It turns out the data plan only works for Italy (duh) and so I was left without my ever handy google maps. Still found a way to navigate and went off exploring. Austin works right next to checkpoint Charley, the border station between East and West Berlin, so I'll start with the photos there.

Like Rome, the history stares you in the face in Berlin. Wherever the wall used to be, they put in those two rows of bricks in the sidewalk, all over the city. Berlin is a very American city. While it is distinctly German, the corporate image and business presence is American. Notice the golden arches directly behind checkpoint Charley, and then one of my favorite stores is doing really well in Berlin:

English is also spoken all over Berlin, except by taxi drivers it seemed. I took the subway to Alexanderplatz, which is kind of a new age modern area on the western side of Berlin.

I'm now going to head in a different direction with the post. In case you can't tell, my mind is all over the place. One thing I didn't do in Germany was sleep. As of this morning, I had gotten less than 17 hours of sleep over a four day stretch. You can do the math how many hours I got a night. So, I'll run through the itinerary and then post lots of photos and provide commentary as I see fit. For those who were in Berlin prior to 2000, this is not the same city. I left Alexanderplatz, went to museum island, explored around all the museums, didn't go in any because the lines were long and my time was short, went to the top of the Berliner Dom (aka the protestant St. Peter's) and then met one of my friends from Albania, who happens to live in Germany. Here's some of the things I saw up to that point:

Notice the weathering effects on the Berliner Dom. Has not aged well

Don't know what it means

Each of those windows is a different store

Statue of Neptune

Like I said, modern city really starting to grow and develop. Hard to believe that less than a century ago this whole region was a ruin. They've added some paint and paved over things and are ready to move on, but more on that cheery topic later. Whoever is the chief architect for the city seems to be trying to compete with Rome. The museums are built in the Greek/Roman style, the Berliner Dom is set up as St. Peter's, I found a Catholic church built like the Pantheon, the Spree could be the Tiber and many other decisions seemed to echo and mirror Rome. I knew Hitler wanted to make this the world capital, so it seems logical that there's a long history of Germany trying to echo the past glories of civilizations.

 I'm going to call it quits here. I've given you enough to chew on, and there's lots more. My days were long (20 hours) and so I'll probably divide these posts even further into two posts of 10 hours a piece. A lot to say and many observations to describe, but as this post is already fairly lengthy and I'm tired, the remainder of Friday will be posted tomorrow. Goodnight!