Just want to fill in the gaps for the last few weeks...
The weekend between getting back from Berlin and EXEAT, we saw Tangled in 3D (really good) on Friday and didn't go out on Friday night so working Saturday morning wasn't too bad. On Sat afternoon we went with all the boarders to the theatre to see Goodnight Mister Tom. On the Sunday we went to the cinema and I saw Rango with some of the girls while the others saw Gnomeo and Juliet. The older girls saw I Am Number Four which I want to see sometime.
The Tuesday following, seeing as I started later in the afternoon, I went for walk. The same walk I'd done a few weeks before - along the back of the cemetery behind school. I took lots of photos and went just at the right time to see the sky looking almost sunset-like even though the sun was still high in the sky. I couldn't go as far as I had last time as I saw a huge cloud of smoke across the second road and cops turned up just as I got there.
The next day I did a bit of op shopping. I got a pair of 'Versace Couture' jeans for £1.50. Whether or not they're real I couldn't say but they're awesome anyway - light purple and high-waisted and I will probably cut them into shorts eventually. I also got a denim vest for £2.50 and a couple of nice-patterned skirts for £3 each (one of which is a size 20 but so pretty).
Friday-Sunday we were in Bath (see 2 posts below).
I went down to town every day of the next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, which means a walk up the hill each time. On Tuesday Janet and I saw the Adjustment Bureau because we both started later and Tuesday is cheap movie day. It was okay but the ending sucked. Massive cop out. Wednesday I went down after lunch to get a haircut for £13.95 (the cheapest you'll get - around $23). I just got a trim because my hair was becoming awful, and because I didn't need it washed she cut it dry - I thought she would spray it! Very weird. I was also that awkward person you walk past in a hairdressers who has to stand to have their hair cut... But I think it turned out okay. (No, I have not done anything about my regrowth and it is getting worse/better by the day.)
On Friday night (18th March) we went for dinner at a 60s diner in High Wycombe for Caitlin's birthday on Sunday (since we have to work). We were planning to go out afterwards but I was too tired so just Rose and Caitlin went. I stayed and watched Comic Relief for a while in the flat with the others. I ended up falling asleep on the floor at about midnight and then headed back to Highlands. But it was so moving, I ended up donating £10 to Red Nose Day the next day.
I worked Saturday morning and it was a good feeling not being hungover/ridiculously tired. I even played a bit of tennis with an 8 year old who was surprisingly good. I'm getting so nostalgic every time I see the tennis nets up now (the girls have moved on from lacrosse in school). Rose and I went down to town after lunch and bought ingredients for truffles and came back up and made them for Caitlin. We also spent good time taking pictures of us on Rose's Macbook holding up 'happy birthday Caitlin' signs, which I stuck on her door that night.
On Sunday we got breakfast in the house (including muffins!) and then we took a bus to Henley-on-Thames (I think) and had a packed-lunch picnic on the river. The weather was nice so it was really pleasant. Then we went and painted plates to be put in a kiln, which Amanda and Sam have just picked up (exciting!).
The following day, the four of us walked down to check out the equivalent (but definitely not as good) of Officeworks here, called Staples. It was a bit of an adventure trying to get across a massive roundabout to get there but we did it in the end. It wasn't as big or cheap as Officeworks which was a bit disappointing. We walked back a safer way and saw the uni for the first time.
Wednesday was a nice day, we lay in the sun (YES! So warm and nice!) in the morning and then we watched the dress rehearsal for the lower division (grades 2 and 3) production before work in the afternoon. The main character, who is a boarder at Highlands, was sick so her sister, also a boarder, had to fill in for her, script in hand. I also squeezed in an episode of 90210 (Izzy and I are now on season 2 - me for the second time). The sun was out again on Thursday and we lay out on beanbags on a picnic rug and read and ate cake. Martin (groundskeeper) started mowing the lawns and the smell of fresh grass just added to the Spring feeling! So nice!
We thought that maybe seeing a movie last Friday was wasting the time we could have in the sun but nevertheless we ended up seeing Limitless, which also had a stupid ending, and a seemingly stupid message about drugs. We watched the real performance of the production that night after dinner and then headed down to Yate's. It was the pub's 1st birthday so they had a 'special guest', some soapy star, serving drinks and helping out with the DJing. Izzy was the only one who knew who he was but I was still pretty excited. Caitlin, Georgie and I walked back up the hill (yes, we're silly) and the others taxi'd. I think we got back a bit before 3:30am and God, it was a great feeling not having to work on Saturday morning for the first time in so long (because of holidays our alternating weekends/Monday mornings had gotten out of whack)! On Saturday afternoon I 'helped out' with the international fashion show, which most of the boarders were involved in, because of International Weekend. But really all I did was take photos. I'd watched the rehearsal a few days before and thought it was going to be horrible but it was quite good really.
I worked Sun morning - daylight savings started early that morning and getting the girls up at the usual 8am which was actually now 9am meant I worked an hour less, woo! We were busy making dishes for the international buffet at dinnertime. After brunch/work Rose and I went down to town where I had quite a successful shopping trip: flowery belt £1 and wedges from Primark £4 (meant to be £6 but whatcha gonna do); lacy summer PJ set from the op shop £2.50 which works as a jumpsuit; an amazing ring from Topshop £8.50 (just about the only thing not on sale); and a compact mirror (on my travel to-buy list) from another op shop for 99p. The buffet was so so yummy that night and we all ate so much.
I've been pretty tired this week. Caitlin and I went into town on Tuesday to check out some travel things like towels, sleeping bags and backpacks, since we leave in 8 days! So close! Camille (an amazing cook who helps at Highlands every weeknight) brought me in some of her travel bags and a travel towel last night for me to have a look at so hopefully that takes away some of the stress. Yesterday, Janet, Caitlin & I got driven to Hughenden, 10 minutes down the road, to do a walk and a risk assessment, as the girls will be doing a sponsored walk there next term. It was quite uneven, lots of uphill and downhill and a bit slippery but it was very pretty at times and good exercise for us. It started raining though which wasn't so nice. It took 1 3/4 hours but with the girls it will be hell. It will probably take 3 hours with them and we'll have to put up with moaning and complaining. Ah well, don't have to think about that till May!
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
I said I'd do a post about my daily/weekly life here. So here goes...
- During the week my general hours are 7am (earlier to wake up the girls) till around 9.30am and then 3.30pm to about 9.30pm. However, Caitlin and I alternate Monday mornings and I also have every Tuesday morning off. I start at 5.30pm on Thursday afternoons. The boarding gaps have every Friday off (which I've mentioned previously).
- In the mornings, we wake the girls up, take them down to breakfast, come back and get them ready for school, hustle them off to school/escort the form 1s (about grade 2) to school, come back and do dorm scores, put laundry away, unload the dishwasher, and do any other random jobs (not very often - we're often done before 9.30am).
- In the afternoons: 3.30pm we go and get snack from the kitchen and organise the rest of it, occasionally go and collect a boarder from lodge (grade 1); at 4pm go and get the form 1s; 4-5.30pm put laundry away, help the girls out with prep (homework) who have a club during prep time; 5.30-6.30pm either go across to school to supervise and help the lowers (grade 4) with prep or stay at the house and help the form 1s and 2s; 6.30pm dinner; 7-8pm get the girls ready for bed, check and chase up who's handed in uniform for washing; 8-8.45pm get the different year levels to bed and lights out 15 minutes later; 8.45-9.30pm put washing on, load the dishwasher, sit in the office and hope no-one comes down comlaining of crying, talking or sickness.
- Caitlin and I go across to the gap flat after work probably at least 3 nights a week to see the others *coughwatch90210withIzzy*.
- On weekends, I either work Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon OR Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Morning shift goes from 8am to 12.30pm (lunch) and afternoon is 12.30pm to about 9.30pm. Breakfast is at 8:30am and dinner is at 5:30pm.
- On Saturday mornings the girls have some sort of activity, whether it be something crafty, a skipping or cheerleading workshop or a dental hygenist coming in to talk about brushing properly. The afternoons are pretty relaxing, often with 'sweet shop' where the girls can choose a bunch of sweets up to 50p, and hot snacks and a movie in the evening.
- Sunday mornings sometimes there is a service, put on by either David (headmaster) or one of the houses - ours was on Valentine's Day - and then a brunch at 11:30am. Sunday afternoons are also pretty chill and we try to get the girls off to bed a bit earlier.
- During the day on weekdays, us 4 boarding gaps usually meet up at Highlands and just waste time on the computers, walk down to town, go for a walk and other fun things. We've also been busy booking accomodation for Easter and now -- IT'S ALL BOOKED! Milan, Venice, Rome and Istanbul are all organised and we are so excited! So, in 20 days, we take a plane to Milan, stay 3 days, train to Venice, stay 3 days, take an overnight train to Rome, stay 4 days then fly to Istanbul where we stay 1 night before our 9 day ANZAC tour starts, then stay another 3 days afterwards before flying back to London in time for the summer term to start. Eeeee!
Hope you've now got a good idea of what my life here is like and that this was a bit easier to read :)
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The weekend just gone was our 2nd EXEAT (boarder's leave and no work for us) so we decided to head to Bath on Friday.
We got up early for breakfast and had a minor freak out about train ticket prices - Caitlin thought a return ticket had gone up £20 overnight - but it turned out fine. We took the train to Marylebone, then one to Paddington, and another to Bath Spa, the station at Bath. All up a 3 hour trip from High Wycombe. Coming into Bath on the train, we got fantastic views of the hillsides covered in old houses. We walked to our hostel although we couldn't find it at first as the sign was very small and there weren't many street numbers. We arrived a couple of hours before check-in so we left our bags in a locker and had a walk around. We got pasties for lunch (spinach/feta and Moroccan veg), sat down on a bench in the middle of the main street to eat (and it wasn't too cold!) and then got McFlurries. We found a little indoor market, where Janet and I bought little mother of pearl rings for £1 and saw lots of yummy cakes. Then we headed to Bath Abbey to meet for a free walking tour. Our guide Colin took us from the Abbey, Roman baths and Pump Room (cafe) down Bath Street, past the Cross Baths (formerly only for the rich), the Theatre Royal, Queen's Square, the 'Circus', a half-ellipse of Georgian houses, past the Fashion Museum and Assembly Rooms and Jolly's, the oldest department store (in Britain?). After the 2 hour tour we rushed back to the hostel to get our bags out of the locker and check in. We found our way to Sally Lunn's Eating House, where the Sally Lunn Bun is a must-eat, according to Bath's tourist website. You get half a bun - they are massive - with whatever topping you want; between us we got raspberry, cinnamon and lemon curd, all really nice and the big hot chocolate was delicious too. We sat in the Jane Austen room, and then we had a look at the museum downstairs which was nothing special. Nearby we saw a sweets shop, a fudge shop and an ice-cream shop but by that time they were all shut.
I'd read on the Bath website that the theatre has 40 standby tickets for their show each night for £6 so we went and asked about that. History Boys was showing but at 8pm, and Rose was to arrive at 8:30pm so we decided to save that for Saturday night. We headed back to the hostel and up to the 'chill out room' where we didn't do much. We went to meet Rose at the station and then tried to find somewhere to eat. We ended up at Wagamama, bad I know seeing as they're in Melbourne and High Wycombe, but my gyozas were really yummy. After dinner we went down to the bar/inn which is right next to the dorms and is where reception for the accommodation is. We got cheap drinks because we were staying there but there wasn't really that much going on - bad bands - so we headed up to bed about 11:30 I think.
Saturday morning at 2am, we were woken by these bitch bogan Aussies who came in and turned the lights on and kicked Rose out of her ('their') bed. Not very impressed. We got up at 8am and went down for free breakfast, not exactly like Wombat's though - just cereal, toast and drinks. We walked to the Jane Austen centre, realised it wasn't open for another 15 minutes, and went inside Queen's Square nearby, which is a pretty little square with a tall monument, blossoms, and weirdly-shaped trees. We went back and bought tickets for JA and got a little introduction about her family life and time in Bath. Then we walked through the exhibition, and watched a short video, and ended in the gift shop. There were a few pieces of clothing in the exhibition too. We went back to the theatre to find out about standby tickets for that night and had 25 minutes till the tickets went on sale so we went down to the bead, sweets and fudge shops. The fudge was seriously amazing; wish I could say the same about the jazzles/jazzies (freckles) I bought at the sweets shop which were just gross. We went back and bought our tickets and then had not very long till our tour to Stonehenge was supposed to start. We chose, ordered and scoffed 2 pizzas between us really quickly and then rushed to the tourist info shop to find out where to meet, before rushing there. Only to find that we were booked in for the earlier tour that day, and that they were now full, and could we come tomorrow morning? So then we were sad that we couldn't savour our pizza, but we went and got joint tickets for the Baths and Fashion Museum for £13.30.
The baths were pretty amazing, lots of statues around the top of Roman governors of Britain and Emperors with connections to Britain. It had an audio guide although you couldn't listen to everything if you wanted to see it all. We ended up at the Pump Room where we got a free taste of the hot spring water. Quite weird, apparently it has like 40 minerals in it, but we drank it all. It's probably good for you. We headed off for the fashion museum, where we also had portable audio guides. There were 3 exhibitions - wedding dresses over the 20th century (perhaps earlier), 'behind the scenes' which was just their archives split up into decades with a little about each decade and the main trends, and the last one was changes to day and evening wear over the 20th century, including the dress of the year and fashion in music. We also tried on corsets and very shapely skirts.
After this we were all pretty tired so we looked for a cafe. The first one we went into didn't have bath buns so we just got drinks and then went to the patisserie nearby for sweets. We ate them in the chillout room: the bun was really nice, a bit subtle but then with a nice sweet sticky bit in the middle. We got ready for the theatre and ate dinner at the inn. Woo discounts! My qauesadilla was yummy although the meals took a little while. Our seats at the theatre were limited to the 2 very back rows; we sat in the second last for the first half then moved back to see better for the second half. It was a bit of a weird show, but very amusing. When we came out it was raining and our half-plan to go out afterwards wasn't really on our minds anymore. We went to bed pretty much straightaway when we got back.
On Sunday we got up at 7:30am so we could have a nice breakfast and pack up and get to the Stonehenge tour at 9:30am. We decided we would buy breakfast, seeing as we got such good discounts. Greer and I shared pancakes for £1.50 and an omelette with mozzarella and tomato for £2. They were both really tasty but they took a lot longer than the others'!
We found our purple tour bus and put some of our bags in the bus as we had to take everything with us (we would get back after check-out). The bus was really bouncy but the countryside was gorgeous and our driver pointed out lots of things on the way including cottages with thatched rooves and the white chalk horse on the side of a hill a couple of miles away. We arrived at 10:20am and had an hour to have a look. The stones were actually a lot smaller than any of us thought they would be and pretty much right on the road! The barriers took us all the way around the outside so my photos show lots of different angles. We had another audio guide for this too, but I'm not sure how much I actually took in. The voice would say 'move onto the next spot, but keep listening' and then it would keep talking. The giftshop was really crowded so we didn't spend long in there and we headed back to the bus. We got back at 12:30pm and headed straight to the station. Buses were replacing trains till 4pm so we found out how to get back (they print out a really helpful slip which tells you exactly where/when/what to do - bus, train, train, train, bus) and Rose and I left while Caitlin, Greer and Janet waited for the bus to go straight back as they all had to work. I worked the Sunday evening of last EXEAT, so that's another good thing about having 2 gaps in the house.
Rose and I got ice-cream, reeally good, and then went inside the Bath Abbey. There were no tours happening as it was Sunday, but it was so gorgeous. I was running out of space on my camera but I managed to get some nice shots. We went and bought more fudge seeing as it was so so so good and then had a look in some shops, which just made us a bit depressed. We went and got a late lunch at a cute place where we sat upstairs in a bright, way too hot room with an orange feature wall and shared a panini and soup. We stopped in the souvenir shop on the way to the station and then began our 4 hour trip home of bus to Swindon, train to Paddington, train to Marylebone, train to Amersham, bus to High Wycombe, walk up the hill. Fun fun. We got home just after 7pm.
We got up early for breakfast and had a minor freak out about train ticket prices - Caitlin thought a return ticket had gone up £20 overnight - but it turned out fine. We took the train to Marylebone, then one to Paddington, and another to Bath Spa, the station at Bath. All up a 3 hour trip from High Wycombe. Coming into Bath on the train, we got fantastic views of the hillsides covered in old houses. We walked to our hostel although we couldn't find it at first as the sign was very small and there weren't many street numbers. We arrived a couple of hours before check-in so we left our bags in a locker and had a walk around. We got pasties for lunch (spinach/feta and Moroccan veg), sat down on a bench in the middle of the main street to eat (and it wasn't too cold!) and then got McFlurries. We found a little indoor market, where Janet and I bought little mother of pearl rings for £1 and saw lots of yummy cakes. Then we headed to Bath Abbey to meet for a free walking tour. Our guide Colin took us from the Abbey, Roman baths and Pump Room (cafe) down Bath Street, past the Cross Baths (formerly only for the rich), the Theatre Royal, Queen's Square, the 'Circus', a half-ellipse of Georgian houses, past the Fashion Museum and Assembly Rooms and Jolly's, the oldest department store (in Britain?). After the 2 hour tour we rushed back to the hostel to get our bags out of the locker and check in. We found our way to Sally Lunn's Eating House, where the Sally Lunn Bun is a must-eat, according to Bath's tourist website. You get half a bun - they are massive - with whatever topping you want; between us we got raspberry, cinnamon and lemon curd, all really nice and the big hot chocolate was delicious too. We sat in the Jane Austen room, and then we had a look at the museum downstairs which was nothing special. Nearby we saw a sweets shop, a fudge shop and an ice-cream shop but by that time they were all shut.
I'd read on the Bath website that the theatre has 40 standby tickets for their show each night for £6 so we went and asked about that. History Boys was showing but at 8pm, and Rose was to arrive at 8:30pm so we decided to save that for Saturday night. We headed back to the hostel and up to the 'chill out room' where we didn't do much. We went to meet Rose at the station and then tried to find somewhere to eat. We ended up at Wagamama, bad I know seeing as they're in Melbourne and High Wycombe, but my gyozas were really yummy. After dinner we went down to the bar/inn which is right next to the dorms and is where reception for the accommodation is. We got cheap drinks because we were staying there but there wasn't really that much going on - bad bands - so we headed up to bed about 11:30 I think.
Saturday morning at 2am, we were woken by these bitch bogan Aussies who came in and turned the lights on and kicked Rose out of her ('their') bed. Not very impressed. We got up at 8am and went down for free breakfast, not exactly like Wombat's though - just cereal, toast and drinks. We walked to the Jane Austen centre, realised it wasn't open for another 15 minutes, and went inside Queen's Square nearby, which is a pretty little square with a tall monument, blossoms, and weirdly-shaped trees. We went back and bought tickets for JA and got a little introduction about her family life and time in Bath. Then we walked through the exhibition, and watched a short video, and ended in the gift shop. There were a few pieces of clothing in the exhibition too. We went back to the theatre to find out about standby tickets for that night and had 25 minutes till the tickets went on sale so we went down to the bead, sweets and fudge shops. The fudge was seriously amazing; wish I could say the same about the jazzles/jazzies (freckles) I bought at the sweets shop which were just gross. We went back and bought our tickets and then had not very long till our tour to Stonehenge was supposed to start. We chose, ordered and scoffed 2 pizzas between us really quickly and then rushed to the tourist info shop to find out where to meet, before rushing there. Only to find that we were booked in for the earlier tour that day, and that they were now full, and could we come tomorrow morning? So then we were sad that we couldn't savour our pizza, but we went and got joint tickets for the Baths and Fashion Museum for £13.30.
The baths were pretty amazing, lots of statues around the top of Roman governors of Britain and Emperors with connections to Britain. It had an audio guide although you couldn't listen to everything if you wanted to see it all. We ended up at the Pump Room where we got a free taste of the hot spring water. Quite weird, apparently it has like 40 minerals in it, but we drank it all. It's probably good for you. We headed off for the fashion museum, where we also had portable audio guides. There were 3 exhibitions - wedding dresses over the 20th century (perhaps earlier), 'behind the scenes' which was just their archives split up into decades with a little about each decade and the main trends, and the last one was changes to day and evening wear over the 20th century, including the dress of the year and fashion in music. We also tried on corsets and very shapely skirts.
After this we were all pretty tired so we looked for a cafe. The first one we went into didn't have bath buns so we just got drinks and then went to the patisserie nearby for sweets. We ate them in the chillout room: the bun was really nice, a bit subtle but then with a nice sweet sticky bit in the middle. We got ready for the theatre and ate dinner at the inn. Woo discounts! My qauesadilla was yummy although the meals took a little while. Our seats at the theatre were limited to the 2 very back rows; we sat in the second last for the first half then moved back to see better for the second half. It was a bit of a weird show, but very amusing. When we came out it was raining and our half-plan to go out afterwards wasn't really on our minds anymore. We went to bed pretty much straightaway when we got back.
On Sunday we got up at 7:30am so we could have a nice breakfast and pack up and get to the Stonehenge tour at 9:30am. We decided we would buy breakfast, seeing as we got such good discounts. Greer and I shared pancakes for £1.50 and an omelette with mozzarella and tomato for £2. They were both really tasty but they took a lot longer than the others'!
We found our purple tour bus and put some of our bags in the bus as we had to take everything with us (we would get back after check-out). The bus was really bouncy but the countryside was gorgeous and our driver pointed out lots of things on the way including cottages with thatched rooves and the white chalk horse on the side of a hill a couple of miles away. We arrived at 10:20am and had an hour to have a look. The stones were actually a lot smaller than any of us thought they would be and pretty much right on the road! The barriers took us all the way around the outside so my photos show lots of different angles. We had another audio guide for this too, but I'm not sure how much I actually took in. The voice would say 'move onto the next spot, but keep listening' and then it would keep talking. The giftshop was really crowded so we didn't spend long in there and we headed back to the bus. We got back at 12:30pm and headed straight to the station. Buses were replacing trains till 4pm so we found out how to get back (they print out a really helpful slip which tells you exactly where/when/what to do - bus, train, train, train, bus) and Rose and I left while Caitlin, Greer and Janet waited for the bus to go straight back as they all had to work. I worked the Sunday evening of last EXEAT, so that's another good thing about having 2 gaps in the house.
Rose and I got ice-cream, reeally good, and then went inside the Bath Abbey. There were no tours happening as it was Sunday, but it was so gorgeous. I was running out of space on my camera but I managed to get some nice shots. We went and bought more fudge seeing as it was so so so good and then had a look in some shops, which just made us a bit depressed. We went and got a late lunch at a cute place where we sat upstairs in a bright, way too hot room with an orange feature wall and shared a panini and soup. We stopped in the souvenir shop on the way to the station and then began our 4 hour trip home of bus to Swindon, train to Paddington, train to Marylebone, train to Amersham, bus to High Wycombe, walk up the hill. Fun fun. We got home just after 7pm.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
The end of Berlin:
On Friday morning, the others got back about 6:30am. Those of us who could, got up at our normal time, had breakfast and headed off to the same meeting place as the other tours to do a tour of Potsdam. Unfortunately it was only us who turned up (and some English guy who was happy to do whatever) so the tour was cancelled. Our would-be guide Paul was from Perth and was also disappointed seeing as he had come in for work and now had no point in being there, but he gave us some suggestions as to what to do once we got to Potsdam (we had already bought daily train tickets). Well, he had one main suggestion and that was to go to the New Palace. We trained to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and discovered that the Potsdam train was going to be 2 hours late, so we decided to head back the way we came and go to the East Side Gallery, which is pieces of the wall with its original graffiti. While on the train, Greer spotted that the train on the next platform was going to Potsdam so we jumped off and took our chances. We're still not sure how the 2 hour delay disappeared but we're glad it did. Once arrived, we went to the tourist info centre to buy a map, and saw that the Neue Palais (new palace) was at the other end of the city, so we headed off and decided to see all that we could on the way. We walked over a bridge which led to Freundschaftsinsel (Friendship Island - nawww) and through streets full of multicoloured shops. It was our warmest day yet which was lovely and there were lots of people around. We found ourselves at the edge of a park and walked through, seeing so many pretty things - icy rivers, nice courtyards, towers, arches, ducks playing in a half-frozen fountain, a Chinese house. Finally arriving at the New Palace, there was also the uni which was just as stunning and another building. Ugly cherubs lined the edges of the top of the building, and we had a look in the little shop before heading back to the station. It felt like a really long walk back, but I guess we were just excited on the way there and we had lots of stops. At the station, I got a proper German brezel (pretzel!) which was so salty and amazingly delicious, and a Kit Kat McFlurry (come on, I have to try them in every country they're sold), which was surprisingly not that good. We got on the train fairly quickly - a DOUBLE STOREY train - and had an express trip back. Back at Wombat's, we half packed then went down to the restaurant next door for our last Berlin dinner. I spent a whole £8 pounds on dinner (penne & pineapple juice, while some of the others got big burgers) - we decided we could splurge! After dinner, I finished packing and then we headed up to the bar for the last time. That was such a cool place and luckily I took a couple of photos the night before :) Rose, Caitlin & I talked to an Italian guy and Caitlin & Janet's new roommate, this really sweet Chinese girl who bought a whole pizza thinking it would be just a slice and shared it with us. We headed to bed about 11:30pm and slept until 3:00am.
Georgie and Aisling got back to the room shortly after, having not slept, and we all left about 3:35am to head for the station, giving ourselves plenty of time. And lucky we did, because when we got there the train was going to be about 15 minutes late, meaning we would miss the bus to the airport at the other end. We ran back to Wombat's to ask if there was any other way to get to Tegel airport (they had been really helpful giving us the first instructions) and were told we could catch the train the other way, then catch a different line and then get the same bus from a different spot. We went back down to the station, where we found our original train was still late but not as late, so we waited for it and thankfully found the bus at the other end with 5 minutes to spare. I asked for 'Fünf Personen, bitte' (five people/tickets, please) and then responded with 'thank-you'. Good job, German Yve. We arrived at the airport about 5am, checked in quickly and just sat. And sat. For an hour. Then we went through the gate and waited even longer. Unfortunately none of the shops opened till 7am and I really wanted a Berlin t-shirt now that Georgie had found a nice one the day before. The flight was really wobbly and you could feel the plane speeding up and slowing down, which was slightly disconcerting, but I slept most of it, on and off. It was also quite an empty plane and I had 3 seats to myself, although I stayed in the aisle seat, generously offering the window seat to Georgie. We got some egg and capsicum pastry which wasn't bad.
At Heathrow, we had to wait half an hour for the bus, although it came a bit early so we just sat (again) in it for a bit. None of us could even be bothered moving inside to wait, probably because we were back in cold temperatures we could actually handle. I slept on and off again. When we got to High Wycombe it was raining so we got a taxi up the hill. Our driver was really nice and drove us right to Lodge door and unloaded our bags for us. Up in the flat, all the teaching gaps had new beds, sheets, doonas, pillow and pillow cases but no mattresses. Back at Highlands it was the same for me. I got straight into slippers, trackies and a t-shirt (warm enough!) and did some fun stuff like washing all my clothes that I'd worn every day for a week just to stay warm, and going through all my receipts/tickets/etc and stapling them into their separate days. My mattress arrived, weeeww! My bed now takes up more than half the width of my room, but the mattress is really high and comfy, and the doona cover and pillow cases are so colourful that they brighten up my room. Caitlin and Janet got back a couple of hours later than us as they'd bought different tickets and went to a different airport. For dinner we headed down to Wagamama, where I got fried rice and miso soup for £7, yummy yummy. Rose came back to Highlands with us and we put on Princess & the Frog, although I fell asleep shortly after it started.
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Phew! Done! Next post will possibly be a general daily/weekly rundown of what I do.
On Friday morning, the others got back about 6:30am. Those of us who could, got up at our normal time, had breakfast and headed off to the same meeting place as the other tours to do a tour of Potsdam. Unfortunately it was only us who turned up (and some English guy who was happy to do whatever) so the tour was cancelled. Our would-be guide Paul was from Perth and was also disappointed seeing as he had come in for work and now had no point in being there, but he gave us some suggestions as to what to do once we got to Potsdam (we had already bought daily train tickets). Well, he had one main suggestion and that was to go to the New Palace. We trained to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and discovered that the Potsdam train was going to be 2 hours late, so we decided to head back the way we came and go to the East Side Gallery, which is pieces of the wall with its original graffiti. While on the train, Greer spotted that the train on the next platform was going to Potsdam so we jumped off and took our chances. We're still not sure how the 2 hour delay disappeared but we're glad it did. Once arrived, we went to the tourist info centre to buy a map, and saw that the Neue Palais (new palace) was at the other end of the city, so we headed off and decided to see all that we could on the way. We walked over a bridge which led to Freundschaftsinsel (Friendship Island - nawww) and through streets full of multicoloured shops. It was our warmest day yet which was lovely and there were lots of people around. We found ourselves at the edge of a park and walked through, seeing so many pretty things - icy rivers, nice courtyards, towers, arches, ducks playing in a half-frozen fountain, a Chinese house. Finally arriving at the New Palace, there was also the uni which was just as stunning and another building. Ugly cherubs lined the edges of the top of the building, and we had a look in the little shop before heading back to the station. It felt like a really long walk back, but I guess we were just excited on the way there and we had lots of stops. At the station, I got a proper German brezel (pretzel!) which was so salty and amazingly delicious, and a Kit Kat McFlurry (come on, I have to try them in every country they're sold), which was surprisingly not that good. We got on the train fairly quickly - a DOUBLE STOREY train - and had an express trip back. Back at Wombat's, we half packed then went down to the restaurant next door for our last Berlin dinner. I spent a whole £8 pounds on dinner (penne & pineapple juice, while some of the others got big burgers) - we decided we could splurge! After dinner, I finished packing and then we headed up to the bar for the last time. That was such a cool place and luckily I took a couple of photos the night before :) Rose, Caitlin & I talked to an Italian guy and Caitlin & Janet's new roommate, this really sweet Chinese girl who bought a whole pizza thinking it would be just a slice and shared it with us. We headed to bed about 11:30pm and slept until 3:00am.
Georgie and Aisling got back to the room shortly after, having not slept, and we all left about 3:35am to head for the station, giving ourselves plenty of time. And lucky we did, because when we got there the train was going to be about 15 minutes late, meaning we would miss the bus to the airport at the other end. We ran back to Wombat's to ask if there was any other way to get to Tegel airport (they had been really helpful giving us the first instructions) and were told we could catch the train the other way, then catch a different line and then get the same bus from a different spot. We went back down to the station, where we found our original train was still late but not as late, so we waited for it and thankfully found the bus at the other end with 5 minutes to spare. I asked for 'Fünf Personen, bitte' (five people/tickets, please) and then responded with 'thank-you'. Good job, German Yve. We arrived at the airport about 5am, checked in quickly and just sat. And sat. For an hour. Then we went through the gate and waited even longer. Unfortunately none of the shops opened till 7am and I really wanted a Berlin t-shirt now that Georgie had found a nice one the day before. The flight was really wobbly and you could feel the plane speeding up and slowing down, which was slightly disconcerting, but I slept most of it, on and off. It was also quite an empty plane and I had 3 seats to myself, although I stayed in the aisle seat, generously offering the window seat to Georgie. We got some egg and capsicum pastry which wasn't bad.
At Heathrow, we had to wait half an hour for the bus, although it came a bit early so we just sat (again) in it for a bit. None of us could even be bothered moving inside to wait, probably because we were back in cold temperatures we could actually handle. I slept on and off again. When we got to High Wycombe it was raining so we got a taxi up the hill. Our driver was really nice and drove us right to Lodge door and unloaded our bags for us. Up in the flat, all the teaching gaps had new beds, sheets, doonas, pillow and pillow cases but no mattresses. Back at Highlands it was the same for me. I got straight into slippers, trackies and a t-shirt (warm enough!) and did some fun stuff like washing all my clothes that I'd worn every day for a week just to stay warm, and going through all my receipts/tickets/etc and stapling them into their separate days. My mattress arrived, weeeww! My bed now takes up more than half the width of my room, but the mattress is really high and comfy, and the doona cover and pillow cases are so colourful that they brighten up my room. Caitlin and Janet got back a couple of hours later than us as they'd bought different tickets and went to a different airport. For dinner we headed down to Wagamama, where I got fried rice and miso soup for £7, yummy yummy. Rose came back to Highlands with us and we put on Princess & the Frog, although I fell asleep shortly after it started.
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Phew! Done! Next post will possibly be a general daily/weekly rundown of what I do.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Second installment of our week in Berlin...
Last Tuesday 22nd Feb we got up just before 9am, not feeling too bad from the night before. We had a big breakfast again and met in the foyer at 10:15am to be taken to the start of the free walking tour. There were a couple of guys from Melbourne and some American women working in Paris who we chatted to on the way. We lined up in a long-ish queue, got numbers and then were put in a group with our guide George, who we could tell was going to be fantastic right from the start: he was funny, entertaining, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and passionate about the things he talked about. So the tour started in Pariser Platz, which stretches in front of the Brandenburg Gate, bank, the 'Wacko Jacko hotel' (where MJ held the baby out over the balcony) and the French Embassy. We saw the Reichstag with its big glass dome on top - you can go up there and literally look down on parliament. But apparently you have to make a reservation and/or there are always really long queues. We got to the holocaust memorial again and George told us a few of the ideas he's heard about the architecture: the concrete slabs represent tombstones in a graveyard of the victims; boxes of bodies to be carried away; soldiers all lined up; and just the general feelings of the victims - walking through the rows, one minute the rest of your party is with you, the next they're not and you don't know which way to find them. There's also a sense of helplessness when you can't see over the blocks and they rise up around you. We then saw the site of Hitler's bunker - as George described, "a dogshit-strewn carpark" which seemed an appropriate places for Hitler's resting place (although he's not actually there). Onwards to the Ministry of Finances with its Nazi architecture and wall images of how communism should have worked vs. the photos on the ground of the faces of those clearly showing it didn't. We saw part of the wall, with a pipe on top rather than the barbed wire which preceded it - nothing to grab once you're up there. Past Checkpoint Charlie (yes, we pretty much saw everything on this tour we'd already seen) and then for a well-needed break at a café (seriously freezing toes by this time, even with 3 pairs of socks).
After our break (taking photos and using the free wifi), we walked to some nice square which sat between the French and German protestant churches and a big building where the Philharmonic orchestra plays. In Summer, they play outside in the square and it is apparently arguably the nicest square in Germany, if not Europe. Pity I can't remember what it was called! Then we went to Bebelplatz where we had gone the previous day, where the Humboldt Uni was - where Einstein had taught and fled from - and also outside where the Nazi book burning had taken place, plus the opera house which will not be showing any opera till 2012/13. There is a little glass-covered hole in the square with empty bookshelves large enough to hold 20,000 books and has no doors to get into... George described it as sort of looking at your past, reflecting on it, but not being able to change it. There is also a plaque with a quote by Heinrich Heine, translated means "Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings", which was surprisingly relevant to the book burning, but his quote was actually from long before. We then walked again along Unter den Linden and into a building we hadn't really considered the day before, the Memorial for Victims of War and Tyranny - an open room is occupied only by a statue of a mother holding her dead child. The artist was a woman called Käthe Kollwitz, who lost siblings, children and her husband due to war, so her work used her own experiences and feelings. Back to the Museum Island and Cathedral, which George told us has mock baroque architecture and was actually only built in 1905. For the end of the tour, we stood at the other end of the Cathedral, in the shade, so so cold, and we heard the story of how the wall eventually 'fell'. We each gave George a £5 tip but wanted to give so much more.
We walked back towards Alexanderplatz, stopping to thaw in an office foyer for a while. We discovered Maccas in Deutschland sells vegie burgers - I know right! - so Aisling and I decided we just had to get one, and its fatty goodness was very much enjoyed. We also walked past a shop dedicated to just the Ampelmann (click to see) - the east German traffic light man - which sold everything from bags to notebooks to pasta in the shape of the little guy. There are also these huge bears everywhere, the symbol of Berlin, in all kinds of colours and poses. We took a train back to the hostel where we met Janet and Caitlin, just arrived from Stuttgart. Georgie and Greer took Caitlin to the holocaust memorial to check out the info centre. We got felafel again that night, although I got a 'mini' pizza from the same place. Then we went up to the bar, met some Argentinians and a Brazilian. The drinks up there were definitely more alcoholic than usual, seeing as I only had 2 and definitely felt something. We left about 1:30am, I washed my hair and was in bed by 2am.
On Wednesday we got up our usual time of 9am for a 9:30am breakfast, to do a tour of Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp, which George had mentioned he was taking the day before. We left for the meeting point a bit late and ended up running from the station but we got there in time to stand in the queue. We left about 11:30am and the trip to Oranienburg was about 45 minutes. We walked the same path from the station to the camp which the prisoners would have taken way back in the 30s/40s. Once there, George showed us on a 3D horizontal map where the tour would be taking us exactly. First we heard about the dehumanisation of all the prisoners, where their heads are shaved, all the belongings including clothes taken away from them, and they receive their prison clothes and a number. We also stood in front of the main tower where the watchers could see over the whole camp. They would take roll call every morning and this could take hours to get through the thousands of prisoners, and often they died standing there in the freezing cold or blazing heat. We also went into a couple of the houses where the prisoners slept, washed and went to the toilet and where there was now an exhibition. Then there was the extermination chamber which was horrible to hear about and the trench where they buried the prisoners' ashes. If their relatives wanted to pay a small fee for their loved one's ashes, the soldiers would go out and fill a box with any number of peoples' ashes - they were all just chucked in there together. We saw the sites where medical experiments took place, often making the prisoners deathly sick so they could study them. All up, it was a very horrible place but one we're all glad we saw.
We had to run back to the station so that we wouldn't have to wait 20 minutes for a train, and met a couple of girls from Melbourne on the train. Greer, Georgie, Janet and Caitlin went back to Wombat's, while Rose, Aisling and I finally got to the info centre at the Holocaust memorial. There was so much in there, and it was sort of hard to take it all in. First there was a strip with general info about Jews being deported and/or murdered and the time line to do with different countries. I was glad we had been to Sachsenhausen before this, as I could now picture the stories about the concentration camps much better. There were excerpts from letters to family members from those about to be murdered, as well as stories about specific Jewish families, some who survived and some who didn't. We then headed back to Wombat's and walked up Torstraße to a big intersection of restaurants. We ended up in a Chinese place which shared the inside with yet another felafel place. I got a yummy fried rice, but nearing the end I got horrible pains in my stomach. I don't think it could have been the food though because it came on too quickly but I still have no idea what caused it. Walking back was quite painful but then I rested and slept and felt better. The girls woke me at 11pm when they were going up to the bar but I stayed sleeping, and got up again at 2am to get into my PJs and fall asleep properly.
By the time I woke up on Thursday, I had had a 12 hour sleep - that is definitely not meant to happen on holiday in Berlin! Rose, Greer and I had a slow and relaxing breakfast at 9:30am. Janet and Caitlin were just finishing up when we got down there as they were doing the walking tour that morning and Aisling and Georgie came down just as we were finishing up. We walked to the Fernsehturm (TV tower) and didn't have to wait too long in the queue to buy tickets to go up for the panoramic view of Berlin from above. Unfortunately we did have to throw out our full water bottles which was annoying, as I'd gotten really used to always having water on me. The guy who took us up in the lift spoke German to me and I embarrassingly just smiled and nodded. We spent an hour or so up there, taking millions of photos which I still need to sort through. Unfortunately it was quite foggy, whereas the rest of the week had been very clear. It was still good though, seeing just how far Berlin stretches in all directions is crazy. They had little bits of information all around as well, although it was impossible to read it all as there are people everywhere, kids crawling around and everything. We had the same guy in the lift again going down. This time I impressed him with my 'tscüß' (goodbye). We had a look around Alexanderplatz and saw the Welt-Zeit-Uhr (world time clock) and took photos under 'Melbourne'. We looked in a German clothes shop, and I couldn't understand how they could ever wear the spring collection which filled the shop - it was too cold to imagine! We then took the train to Friedrichstraße and found our way to Bunte Schokowelt, a chocolate 'museum'. There was literally a tiny little exhibition upstairs about making and packaging chocolate and then you just go and buy Ritter chocolate. Which we did. We stocked up on 0,79€ 100g blocks and some bigger ones. There was a 'make your own' section too but it was expensive and took half an hour so we skipped it. We walked to the Tiergarten and had a bit of a wander along the paths. We came to a statue of Mozart/Beethoven/Haydn and a little frozen river behind it, which freakily had a pair of gloves on the surface. We saw a horse and rider statue too but decided it was too big to try and climb. We walked back out into Potsdamerplatz, where we saw an Aussie restaurant and the Sony Centre, whose wifi didn't work :( We took the train back to Wombat's, dropped off our chocolate and went for a walk through the streets we'd walked the other night. It was confusing to try and work out how we actually got there... There were so many shoe shops, mostly just expensive ones, but also one second-hand type store with thousands of shoes (with no prices). It looked like they should have been op shop prices but I highly doubt it. It was almost like a gallery, shoes filled shelves along complete walls all the way to the ceilings and then more in the middle of the room. It would have been heaven if we'd had time to actually look at them all and think that we actually could have afforded a few pairs. I bought a pink rock thing form a bead shop for 7€ but I'm yet to find a chain thin enough for it. We also came across a little market, one nice jewellery store, although when I took a photo the woman said something I couldn't hear/understand. We went back just before 6; we were going to take advantage of the free 4 hours before closing on Thursdays for most of the museums but we were just too tired to. My feet had survived the day okay with 3 pairs of socks but were still sore from so much constant uncomfort. We went and got dinner at 7pm with a couple of Melbourne High guys who the others had come across last night at the bar, at the same place as the night before but this time we mostly bought from the Turkish half of the restaurant. I got a cheese pide.
We walked back to the hostel and waited till 10pm to go to the bar, taking so many random photos beforehand. I also managed to drop my camera very slightly and now the flash won't stay closed which wrecked a good feeling. Still, Caitlin, Rose and I went up and met a couple of Argentinian guys (although their passports were Canadian and Italian?) and had lots of fun and laughs, and only 3 drinks although it felt like so much more. The other girls headed out about 1am to go to a club, while we stayed at the bar till (after) closing time at 2am. We were the last ones there when we left at 2:30am. Eeek. We went down the 7 flights of stairs instead of taking the lift for some reason and then chilled in the lobby for a bit before going for felafel again (not me). That was an interesting half and hour or so. Then Rose and I (Caitlin had gone already) headed up to bed about 3:30am.
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Friday and Saturday will come very soon, I promise!
Last Tuesday 22nd Feb we got up just before 9am, not feeling too bad from the night before. We had a big breakfast again and met in the foyer at 10:15am to be taken to the start of the free walking tour. There were a couple of guys from Melbourne and some American women working in Paris who we chatted to on the way. We lined up in a long-ish queue, got numbers and then were put in a group with our guide George, who we could tell was going to be fantastic right from the start: he was funny, entertaining, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and passionate about the things he talked about. So the tour started in Pariser Platz, which stretches in front of the Brandenburg Gate, bank, the 'Wacko Jacko hotel' (where MJ held the baby out over the balcony) and the French Embassy. We saw the Reichstag with its big glass dome on top - you can go up there and literally look down on parliament. But apparently you have to make a reservation and/or there are always really long queues. We got to the holocaust memorial again and George told us a few of the ideas he's heard about the architecture: the concrete slabs represent tombstones in a graveyard of the victims; boxes of bodies to be carried away; soldiers all lined up; and just the general feelings of the victims - walking through the rows, one minute the rest of your party is with you, the next they're not and you don't know which way to find them. There's also a sense of helplessness when you can't see over the blocks and they rise up around you. We then saw the site of Hitler's bunker - as George described, "a dogshit-strewn carpark" which seemed an appropriate places for Hitler's resting place (although he's not actually there). Onwards to the Ministry of Finances with its Nazi architecture and wall images of how communism should have worked vs. the photos on the ground of the faces of those clearly showing it didn't. We saw part of the wall, with a pipe on top rather than the barbed wire which preceded it - nothing to grab once you're up there. Past Checkpoint Charlie (yes, we pretty much saw everything on this tour we'd already seen) and then for a well-needed break at a café (seriously freezing toes by this time, even with 3 pairs of socks).
After our break (taking photos and using the free wifi), we walked to some nice square which sat between the French and German protestant churches and a big building where the Philharmonic orchestra plays. In Summer, they play outside in the square and it is apparently arguably the nicest square in Germany, if not Europe. Pity I can't remember what it was called! Then we went to Bebelplatz where we had gone the previous day, where the Humboldt Uni was - where Einstein had taught and fled from - and also outside where the Nazi book burning had taken place, plus the opera house which will not be showing any opera till 2012/13. There is a little glass-covered hole in the square with empty bookshelves large enough to hold 20,000 books and has no doors to get into... George described it as sort of looking at your past, reflecting on it, but not being able to change it. There is also a plaque with a quote by Heinrich Heine, translated means "Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings", which was surprisingly relevant to the book burning, but his quote was actually from long before. We then walked again along Unter den Linden and into a building we hadn't really considered the day before, the Memorial for Victims of War and Tyranny - an open room is occupied only by a statue of a mother holding her dead child. The artist was a woman called Käthe Kollwitz, who lost siblings, children and her husband due to war, so her work used her own experiences and feelings. Back to the Museum Island and Cathedral, which George told us has mock baroque architecture and was actually only built in 1905. For the end of the tour, we stood at the other end of the Cathedral, in the shade, so so cold, and we heard the story of how the wall eventually 'fell'. We each gave George a £5 tip but wanted to give so much more.
We walked back towards Alexanderplatz, stopping to thaw in an office foyer for a while. We discovered Maccas in Deutschland sells vegie burgers - I know right! - so Aisling and I decided we just had to get one, and its fatty goodness was very much enjoyed. We also walked past a shop dedicated to just the Ampelmann (click to see) - the east German traffic light man - which sold everything from bags to notebooks to pasta in the shape of the little guy. There are also these huge bears everywhere, the symbol of Berlin, in all kinds of colours and poses. We took a train back to the hostel where we met Janet and Caitlin, just arrived from Stuttgart. Georgie and Greer took Caitlin to the holocaust memorial to check out the info centre. We got felafel again that night, although I got a 'mini' pizza from the same place. Then we went up to the bar, met some Argentinians and a Brazilian. The drinks up there were definitely more alcoholic than usual, seeing as I only had 2 and definitely felt something. We left about 1:30am, I washed my hair and was in bed by 2am.
On Wednesday we got up our usual time of 9am for a 9:30am breakfast, to do a tour of Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp, which George had mentioned he was taking the day before. We left for the meeting point a bit late and ended up running from the station but we got there in time to stand in the queue. We left about 11:30am and the trip to Oranienburg was about 45 minutes. We walked the same path from the station to the camp which the prisoners would have taken way back in the 30s/40s. Once there, George showed us on a 3D horizontal map where the tour would be taking us exactly. First we heard about the dehumanisation of all the prisoners, where their heads are shaved, all the belongings including clothes taken away from them, and they receive their prison clothes and a number. We also stood in front of the main tower where the watchers could see over the whole camp. They would take roll call every morning and this could take hours to get through the thousands of prisoners, and often they died standing there in the freezing cold or blazing heat. We also went into a couple of the houses where the prisoners slept, washed and went to the toilet and where there was now an exhibition. Then there was the extermination chamber which was horrible to hear about and the trench where they buried the prisoners' ashes. If their relatives wanted to pay a small fee for their loved one's ashes, the soldiers would go out and fill a box with any number of peoples' ashes - they were all just chucked in there together. We saw the sites where medical experiments took place, often making the prisoners deathly sick so they could study them. All up, it was a very horrible place but one we're all glad we saw.
We had to run back to the station so that we wouldn't have to wait 20 minutes for a train, and met a couple of girls from Melbourne on the train. Greer, Georgie, Janet and Caitlin went back to Wombat's, while Rose, Aisling and I finally got to the info centre at the Holocaust memorial. There was so much in there, and it was sort of hard to take it all in. First there was a strip with general info about Jews being deported and/or murdered and the time line to do with different countries. I was glad we had been to Sachsenhausen before this, as I could now picture the stories about the concentration camps much better. There were excerpts from letters to family members from those about to be murdered, as well as stories about specific Jewish families, some who survived and some who didn't. We then headed back to Wombat's and walked up Torstraße to a big intersection of restaurants. We ended up in a Chinese place which shared the inside with yet another felafel place. I got a yummy fried rice, but nearing the end I got horrible pains in my stomach. I don't think it could have been the food though because it came on too quickly but I still have no idea what caused it. Walking back was quite painful but then I rested and slept and felt better. The girls woke me at 11pm when they were going up to the bar but I stayed sleeping, and got up again at 2am to get into my PJs and fall asleep properly.
By the time I woke up on Thursday, I had had a 12 hour sleep - that is definitely not meant to happen on holiday in Berlin! Rose, Greer and I had a slow and relaxing breakfast at 9:30am. Janet and Caitlin were just finishing up when we got down there as they were doing the walking tour that morning and Aisling and Georgie came down just as we were finishing up. We walked to the Fernsehturm (TV tower) and didn't have to wait too long in the queue to buy tickets to go up for the panoramic view of Berlin from above. Unfortunately we did have to throw out our full water bottles which was annoying, as I'd gotten really used to always having water on me. The guy who took us up in the lift spoke German to me and I embarrassingly just smiled and nodded. We spent an hour or so up there, taking millions of photos which I still need to sort through. Unfortunately it was quite foggy, whereas the rest of the week had been very clear. It was still good though, seeing just how far Berlin stretches in all directions is crazy. They had little bits of information all around as well, although it was impossible to read it all as there are people everywhere, kids crawling around and everything. We had the same guy in the lift again going down. This time I impressed him with my 'tscüß' (goodbye). We had a look around Alexanderplatz and saw the Welt-Zeit-Uhr (world time clock) and took photos under 'Melbourne'. We looked in a German clothes shop, and I couldn't understand how they could ever wear the spring collection which filled the shop - it was too cold to imagine! We then took the train to Friedrichstraße and found our way to Bunte Schokowelt, a chocolate 'museum'. There was literally a tiny little exhibition upstairs about making and packaging chocolate and then you just go and buy Ritter chocolate. Which we did. We stocked up on 0,79€ 100g blocks and some bigger ones. There was a 'make your own' section too but it was expensive and took half an hour so we skipped it. We walked to the Tiergarten and had a bit of a wander along the paths. We came to a statue of Mozart/Beethoven/Haydn and a little frozen river behind it, which freakily had a pair of gloves on the surface. We saw a horse and rider statue too but decided it was too big to try and climb. We walked back out into Potsdamerplatz, where we saw an Aussie restaurant and the Sony Centre, whose wifi didn't work :( We took the train back to Wombat's, dropped off our chocolate and went for a walk through the streets we'd walked the other night. It was confusing to try and work out how we actually got there... There were so many shoe shops, mostly just expensive ones, but also one second-hand type store with thousands of shoes (with no prices). It looked like they should have been op shop prices but I highly doubt it. It was almost like a gallery, shoes filled shelves along complete walls all the way to the ceilings and then more in the middle of the room. It would have been heaven if we'd had time to actually look at them all and think that we actually could have afforded a few pairs. I bought a pink rock thing form a bead shop for 7€ but I'm yet to find a chain thin enough for it. We also came across a little market, one nice jewellery store, although when I took a photo the woman said something I couldn't hear/understand. We went back just before 6; we were going to take advantage of the free 4 hours before closing on Thursdays for most of the museums but we were just too tired to. My feet had survived the day okay with 3 pairs of socks but were still sore from so much constant uncomfort. We went and got dinner at 7pm with a couple of Melbourne High guys who the others had come across last night at the bar, at the same place as the night before but this time we mostly bought from the Turkish half of the restaurant. I got a cheese pide.
We walked back to the hostel and waited till 10pm to go to the bar, taking so many random photos beforehand. I also managed to drop my camera very slightly and now the flash won't stay closed which wrecked a good feeling. Still, Caitlin, Rose and I went up and met a couple of Argentinian guys (although their passports were Canadian and Italian?) and had lots of fun and laughs, and only 3 drinks although it felt like so much more. The other girls headed out about 1am to go to a club, while we stayed at the bar till (after) closing time at 2am. We were the last ones there when we left at 2:30am. Eeek. We went down the 7 flights of stairs instead of taking the lift for some reason and then chilled in the lobby for a bit before going for felafel again (not me). That was an interesting half and hour or so. Then Rose and I (Caitlin had gone already) headed up to bed about 3:30am.
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Friday and Saturday will come very soon, I promise!
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Berlin - part 1. This is going to take a while.
Caitlin & Janet left on the Friday for Stuttgart, so to avoid being alone in Highlands on Friday night I stayed up at the flat. Izzy's bed was very comfy but somehow I woke up with massive bruises on my shins. Still a mystery to me. I was still trying to fit all my warm stuff for a week into my backpack and handbag until quite late on Friday night, because everyone was doing washing all day/night, but eventually, putting a couple of things into Rose's bag, I managed. I got up at 9am, went over to Highlands to shower/eat/straighten my hair (forgetting my adaptor at least twice) and then we all got ready till 12pm when we headed down the hill. After a quick stop at Poundworld, we bought baguettes for lunch and caught the 1pm bus to Heathrow, which arrived at 2pm. Not having check-in luggage was great - we checked in with machines (no queues) and by 2:30pm were sitting and working out what to do till our plane boarded at 5:05pm. I started to feel quite cold-y/blocked up/headache-y on the bus and while sitting at the airport and I just really wanted a McFlurry. Aisling & I went searching and were told there was NO fast food in the airport. As Aisling rightly said, "That's ridiculous!" So I settled for a hot chocolate and we all got water from Boots just to have the bottles for the week.
The flight wasn't too bad (nice pesto, mozzarella and tomato sandwich) and, although the plane left about 10 minutes late, we still arrived on time at 8:40pm German time - we lost an hour :( We were delighted to hear that it was -2°C outside. Not. Again, not having to collect any luggage was great. We looked for the bus to take to Alexanderplatz, and once there, Georgie eventually spotted the big lit-up 'U' - the underground to take us to the station right around the corner from our hostel. We got to Wombat's about 10pm and had a bit of a problem with getting keys for the room - there were 5 of us and only Georgie had any ID she wanted to hand over in exchange. We were told we could also give a photocopy of our passports and a 5€ deposit so most of us ended up doing that, since we needed the keycards to lock and unlock our lockers. Our dorm was big and the 5 of us took up all but one bed. We made our beds (free linen) and headed up to the bar on the top level, traded in our fake money tokens for free beer, which I couldn't finish - I am so not German - and checked out the balcony, way too cold. Aisling, Georgie and I headed out to try and find somewhere to go out, but ended up just taking photos in a photobooth across the road. Typical. I was still not feeling very well so we went to bed about 1.30am.
On Sunday 20th, our roommate came in about 5am, beginning our not very nice relationship with her. We got up at 9:30am and had our first of our daily Wombat's breakfasts - 3.70€ for all-you-can-eat cereal, yoghurt, hot drinks, juice, bread, rolls, honey, jams, nutella-type spread, fruit, meat and cheese. We filled up and tried to get through each day on just breakfast, which worked surprisingly well. Not knowing how many clothes I may need in this weather, I put on a thermal top and leggings, 200 denier tights, socks over the top, dress, cardigan, scarf, gloves, hat and coat. My boots were dead by the end of the week and my feet froze almost every day. The plan of the day was to find at least one flea market. We followed Torstraße, Brunenstraße and Bernauerstraße until we turned the wrong way without realising and ended up conveniently at a documentation centre about the wall. We looked at an exhibition with photos, video and text, and it was so odd to be in the same place where a lot of the photos were taken during the time of the wall. We followed the staircase up to a lookout at the top and realised we were looking across the road at a piece of the wall, literally a piece of history. You could also see the no man's land/death strip from up there. We took some photos in front of the wall and then walked through a little grassy area with photos of all the victims, those who had tried to flee East Germany and had failed. Most of them were only early 20s with some even younger. It was a sad feeling in there. There were also pieces of the wall with original graffiti lined up artistically. We found ourselves at the Nordbahnhof (train station) where an exhibition about the ghost stations and people fleeing on trains that didn't stop was shown. We bought postcards at another little wall shop like good tourists (Mum & Dad, yours is now on the way) and then found our way to the Arkonaplatz flea market. There was graffiti along almost every street, and not mostly tags but actual art (I know it's debatable). The market was small and hidden away, but very sweet. Lots of stuff from clothes and jewels to stools, nuts and bolts and mountains of coathangers. Although I didn't buy anything, I took a sh*tload of photos. We walked back to Wombat's quite frozen and relaxed in the lobby, used the free wifi which didn't work for most of the rest of the week, marked some places on our maps, and chatted to a nice Chilean guy who was visiting lots of cities for just 2 days each. We all had a nap and then had dinner at the felafel place around the corner, which was very yummy including Turkish sweets. I was still not feeling great so I thought I'd stay in that night.
Our roomate again returned not so early in the morning, about 4am this time, and then was gone for good by 8am. I was on the bottom bunk sort of around the corner from her so I wasn't disturbed like the others. I literally jumped out of bed this morning at the sight of snow falling outside our window but it didn't settle at all on the ground. Had breaky, again lots of it. I couldn't believe the day before when I got through 6 hours without eating and I wasn't even hungry. We also started smuggling out fruit and, later in the week, chocolate spread packets. We took the train to Stadtmitte and walked along in the snow, looking at souvenir shops, past Checkpoint Charlie and a public exhibition thing on the side of a yard. Entry to Haus am Checkpoint Charlie was quite high so we walked to the Jewish Museum instead, read lots of stories about those who were deported and/or murdered or their families. They also had a 'Holocaust Tower' which was just a cold, high, grey concrete room with a tiny hole of light at the top, and a 'Memory Void', which was an art piece with a sea of metal cut-out faces all with angry, confused or sad faces. It was all quite moving. We realised at the end that there was so much we hadn't seen or had rushed through at the end, trying to find out way out. We searched for the Gugenheim which was free on Mondays but couldn't pinpoint it to a street on the map, but I'm pretty sure we were very close when we saw all the other amazing buildings - the Humboldt Uni, lots of other museums on the Museuminsel (island) and the Dom (cathedral), along Unter den Linden. If you go to this area, beware of the women who constantly ask 'Speak English?' before holding out a card which asks for money. Their kids seemed to be doing it too, and it just got annoying. We continued walking, LOTS of walking, to the Brandenburger Tor (gate), past Madame Tussaud's, and onwards to the Holcaust Memorial, which is just the lazy and incorrect name for the 'Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas' = 'Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe'. There is another memorial for the homosexual victims as well as some other groups, which we didn't get to see. Unfortunately the underground info centre wasn't open on Mondays so we promised ourselves to come back later in the week. Oh, and the memorial is indescribale. A huge number of concrete blocks of the same width and length but of different heights all line up in a grid. Walking through it, you don't know where you're going, which way to turn, etc. We walked to the nearby Potsdamerplatz to catch the train back and again relaxed in the lobby for a while, before having another little nap. Georgie wasn't feeling well so the rest of us went walking around the area, looking for somewhere for dinner. We walked past lots of cute little boutiques, and so. many. shoe shops. We ate at a cheapish little place where we all got pasta (cheese & spinach gnocchi for me) and were very full. Trying to find our way back to Wombat's was a bit of a struggle in the dark. We ended up in a totally different direction from where we thought we were, but I asked an old lady for directions in German (*hair flick*) and we got back okay. We didn't do much for a while but then Georgie, Aisling and I went up to the bar again, and chilled with a girl from Boston and 2 guys from Canada who were all hilarious and so nice, despite the age difference of about 10 years (which you never would have guessed!). We also ended up talking to a guy from California, another from Texas, and 2 girls from Paris although one was actually from Brisbane. We had a couple of rounds of Jäger bombs (the others had a serous amount of beer) and then went down to the bar/club around the corner, Kaffee Burger, which Georgie and I had both read about in numerous books/sites and knew we had to go to. It was fun but not young/full enough, plus we were still tired, so we left about 2:30am. Georgie decided she wanted pizza at that point so we got to bed about 3:15am.
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I'm also currently in the process of going through the 1000+ photos I took during the week, I've already deleted 100 so we'll see how I go. Hopefully next blog post will be up tomorrow!
Caitlin & Janet left on the Friday for Stuttgart, so to avoid being alone in Highlands on Friday night I stayed up at the flat. Izzy's bed was very comfy but somehow I woke up with massive bruises on my shins. Still a mystery to me. I was still trying to fit all my warm stuff for a week into my backpack and handbag until quite late on Friday night, because everyone was doing washing all day/night, but eventually, putting a couple of things into Rose's bag, I managed. I got up at 9am, went over to Highlands to shower/eat/straighten my hair (forgetting my adaptor at least twice) and then we all got ready till 12pm when we headed down the hill. After a quick stop at Poundworld, we bought baguettes for lunch and caught the 1pm bus to Heathrow, which arrived at 2pm. Not having check-in luggage was great - we checked in with machines (no queues) and by 2:30pm were sitting and working out what to do till our plane boarded at 5:05pm. I started to feel quite cold-y/blocked up/headache-y on the bus and while sitting at the airport and I just really wanted a McFlurry. Aisling & I went searching and were told there was NO fast food in the airport. As Aisling rightly said, "That's ridiculous!" So I settled for a hot chocolate and we all got water from Boots just to have the bottles for the week.
The flight wasn't too bad (nice pesto, mozzarella and tomato sandwich) and, although the plane left about 10 minutes late, we still arrived on time at 8:40pm German time - we lost an hour :( We were delighted to hear that it was -2°C outside. Not. Again, not having to collect any luggage was great. We looked for the bus to take to Alexanderplatz, and once there, Georgie eventually spotted the big lit-up 'U' - the underground to take us to the station right around the corner from our hostel. We got to Wombat's about 10pm and had a bit of a problem with getting keys for the room - there were 5 of us and only Georgie had any ID she wanted to hand over in exchange. We were told we could also give a photocopy of our passports and a 5€ deposit so most of us ended up doing that, since we needed the keycards to lock and unlock our lockers. Our dorm was big and the 5 of us took up all but one bed. We made our beds (free linen) and headed up to the bar on the top level, traded in our fake money tokens for free beer, which I couldn't finish - I am so not German - and checked out the balcony, way too cold. Aisling, Georgie and I headed out to try and find somewhere to go out, but ended up just taking photos in a photobooth across the road. Typical. I was still not feeling very well so we went to bed about 1.30am.
On Sunday 20th, our roommate came in about 5am, beginning our not very nice relationship with her. We got up at 9:30am and had our first of our daily Wombat's breakfasts - 3.70€ for all-you-can-eat cereal, yoghurt, hot drinks, juice, bread, rolls, honey, jams, nutella-type spread, fruit, meat and cheese. We filled up and tried to get through each day on just breakfast, which worked surprisingly well. Not knowing how many clothes I may need in this weather, I put on a thermal top and leggings, 200 denier tights, socks over the top, dress, cardigan, scarf, gloves, hat and coat. My boots were dead by the end of the week and my feet froze almost every day. The plan of the day was to find at least one flea market. We followed Torstraße, Brunenstraße and Bernauerstraße until we turned the wrong way without realising and ended up conveniently at a documentation centre about the wall. We looked at an exhibition with photos, video and text, and it was so odd to be in the same place where a lot of the photos were taken during the time of the wall. We followed the staircase up to a lookout at the top and realised we were looking across the road at a piece of the wall, literally a piece of history. You could also see the no man's land/death strip from up there. We took some photos in front of the wall and then walked through a little grassy area with photos of all the victims, those who had tried to flee East Germany and had failed. Most of them were only early 20s with some even younger. It was a sad feeling in there. There were also pieces of the wall with original graffiti lined up artistically. We found ourselves at the Nordbahnhof (train station) where an exhibition about the ghost stations and people fleeing on trains that didn't stop was shown. We bought postcards at another little wall shop like good tourists (Mum & Dad, yours is now on the way) and then found our way to the Arkonaplatz flea market. There was graffiti along almost every street, and not mostly tags but actual art (I know it's debatable). The market was small and hidden away, but very sweet. Lots of stuff from clothes and jewels to stools, nuts and bolts and mountains of coathangers. Although I didn't buy anything, I took a sh*tload of photos. We walked back to Wombat's quite frozen and relaxed in the lobby, used the free wifi which didn't work for most of the rest of the week, marked some places on our maps, and chatted to a nice Chilean guy who was visiting lots of cities for just 2 days each. We all had a nap and then had dinner at the felafel place around the corner, which was very yummy including Turkish sweets. I was still not feeling great so I thought I'd stay in that night.
Our roomate again returned not so early in the morning, about 4am this time, and then was gone for good by 8am. I was on the bottom bunk sort of around the corner from her so I wasn't disturbed like the others. I literally jumped out of bed this morning at the sight of snow falling outside our window but it didn't settle at all on the ground. Had breaky, again lots of it. I couldn't believe the day before when I got through 6 hours without eating and I wasn't even hungry. We also started smuggling out fruit and, later in the week, chocolate spread packets. We took the train to Stadtmitte and walked along in the snow, looking at souvenir shops, past Checkpoint Charlie and a public exhibition thing on the side of a yard. Entry to Haus am Checkpoint Charlie was quite high so we walked to the Jewish Museum instead, read lots of stories about those who were deported and/or murdered or their families. They also had a 'Holocaust Tower' which was just a cold, high, grey concrete room with a tiny hole of light at the top, and a 'Memory Void', which was an art piece with a sea of metal cut-out faces all with angry, confused or sad faces. It was all quite moving. We realised at the end that there was so much we hadn't seen or had rushed through at the end, trying to find out way out. We searched for the Gugenheim which was free on Mondays but couldn't pinpoint it to a street on the map, but I'm pretty sure we were very close when we saw all the other amazing buildings - the Humboldt Uni, lots of other museums on the Museuminsel (island) and the Dom (cathedral), along Unter den Linden. If you go to this area, beware of the women who constantly ask 'Speak English?' before holding out a card which asks for money. Their kids seemed to be doing it too, and it just got annoying. We continued walking, LOTS of walking, to the Brandenburger Tor (gate), past Madame Tussaud's, and onwards to the Holcaust Memorial, which is just the lazy and incorrect name for the 'Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas' = 'Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe'. There is another memorial for the homosexual victims as well as some other groups, which we didn't get to see. Unfortunately the underground info centre wasn't open on Mondays so we promised ourselves to come back later in the week. Oh, and the memorial is indescribale. A huge number of concrete blocks of the same width and length but of different heights all line up in a grid. Walking through it, you don't know where you're going, which way to turn, etc. We walked to the nearby Potsdamerplatz to catch the train back and again relaxed in the lobby for a while, before having another little nap. Georgie wasn't feeling well so the rest of us went walking around the area, looking for somewhere for dinner. We walked past lots of cute little boutiques, and so. many. shoe shops. We ate at a cheapish little place where we all got pasta (cheese & spinach gnocchi for me) and were very full. Trying to find our way back to Wombat's was a bit of a struggle in the dark. We ended up in a totally different direction from where we thought we were, but I asked an old lady for directions in German (*hair flick*) and we got back okay. We didn't do much for a while but then Georgie, Aisling and I went up to the bar again, and chilled with a girl from Boston and 2 guys from Canada who were all hilarious and so nice, despite the age difference of about 10 years (which you never would have guessed!). We also ended up talking to a guy from California, another from Texas, and 2 girls from Paris although one was actually from Brisbane. We had a couple of rounds of Jäger bombs (the others had a serous amount of beer) and then went down to the bar/club around the corner, Kaffee Burger, which Georgie and I had both read about in numerous books/sites and knew we had to go to. It was fun but not young/full enough, plus we were still tired, so we left about 2:30am. Georgie decided she wanted pizza at that point so we got to bed about 3:15am.
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I'm also currently in the process of going through the 1000+ photos I took during the week, I've already deleted 100 so we'll see how I go. Hopefully next blog post will be up tomorrow!
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