Dunkin' Donuts in Berlin

The first words you want to hear at your hostel after a ten hour bus ride are not “We have no heat and no hot water.” We stayed in a thirteen-person dorm room, and nine of our roommates were smelly boys; perhaps the no-hot-water-situation wasn’t exactly motivation for them to bathe. The hostel let guests use the shower at an apartment building just down the road, but a single shower for a hostel that easily sleeps over 100 guests makes for a long wait. The two other girls in our room were from the States, and they were nice and clean. They are studying abroad in Ireland and were traveling during their spring break. We walked to New Europe’s West Berlin meeting spot, which is so cleverly placed right beside a Dunkin’ Donuts, with the other Yanks the next morning (we’re up to 2 April now).

We met one New Europe guide in West Berlin who showed us to the main meeting spot in East Berlin. This guide was precious! He is from Maine, and he’s been living in Germany on an artist visa since he graduated from NYU. He was energetic and enthusiastic, everything a tourist wants her guide to be. Unfortunately, however, he was not our guide. Our guide was just the opposite. He was fidgety and nervous. He had a hard time concentrating and therefore had a hard time keeping the attention of his group. His hair was on the verge of dreadlocks, but he didn’t take enough care to actually twist the strands, leaving it matted in some places, and sticking out in others. He told the story of Berlin—a very exciting one to tell (Nazis and Communists in the same century)—with no enthusiasm. However, one bad tour guide will NOT make me lose my confidence in New Europe!

We spent the rest of the afternoon running errands and trying to make it back to our hostel. I usually have pretty good luck working out public transportation, but this was not the case our first day in Berlin. A single map has metros, trains, buses, and trams. There are two separate metro lines that have nothing to do with each other, and I’m still not sure where the trains go. It took us nearly two hours to find our way back. Such are the woes of traveling. When we finally did arrive at the hostel of hell, our feet and hips ached, and our faces must have looked as exhausted as our spirits. The girl who checked us in the night before had mercy upon us and offered us “all you can eat” from dinner leftovers for a mere €2.50. I sampled the lasagna, but I was excited about the side dishes. We had vegetables!!! Vegetables, while a necessity for a healthy diet, are a rarity to a backpacker.

The next day (3 April), we took the New Europe tour on the Third Reich. Our guide, Collin, made up for everything the previous day’s guide was not. And he was from Scotland!!!! Collin grew up in a small town on Loch Lomond and studied in Edinburgh. He made me “home” sick. The five hour tour rapidly took us through the city and through some of the city’s darkest history. We saw the site of Hitler’s former bunker and several memorials (to the murdered Jews, the murdered homosexuals, the murdered politicians, etc). Germany’s approach after WW2 was to stop history lessons at the beginning of the 20th century. To Germany’s youth, WW1, WW2, the Holocaust, and the Nazi regime never happened. When that generation started laying down the law, Germany’s unused history books were dusted off and the details of the past were brought to the forefront, made widely available to al the public as a memorial and a lesson.

All seriousness aside, one of my highlights from the Berlin trip was a darling girl from North Carolina. The second she opened her mouth, Anna and I perked up at the Southern drawl. It’s not one of those pleasant to the ear accents, but rather one that sounds like a bad actor over-exaggerating the dialect of an uneducated farmhand. More than once did she refer to hunting (pronounce hun’en) as a favorite past time. At one point, the dear was being picked on by her Floridian travel buddy, and she came to her own defense by declaring, “We PRONOUNCIATE it different where I come from.” She is studying for her masters in criminal justice in London, so she must be doing something right. Bless her.

As Heidi Klum would say, AUF WIEDERSEHEN!

Pictures from Sweden and Poland

Pictures from Berlin