Berlin, part 2

Hallo!

On Saturday we had a city sightseeing tour in Berlin.
We met each other at 2 in the hostel's lobby in order to catch the bus. Yeah, the plan was to do the city tour by bus.. Then we found out that the bus won't start (broken bus? heard before? check our Oktoberfest post) and we need to do it by walking :D We walked to the Alexanderplatz U-bahn station planning to take a metro to Potsdamer Platz, where the guide would be waiting for us. Here in Germany nobody really ever checks tickets in the public transportation so we did not buy them. Of course (!!!!!!) the ticket inspector came right away to check our tickets, which we didn't have... Luckily he was pretty nice and gave us only one fine of 40 € when he could have given it to all 25 of us..  After that we bought tickets: a 5-person group ticket for one day cost 16,20 €.

We made it to Potsdamer Platz and found our guide. We started our tour by walking to the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe through Tiergarten (a huge park).

On our way to the Holocaust memorial we stopped by a smaller memorial to the murdered homosexuals during the holocaust. The memorial was a big "stone" and inside it was a video of kissing homosexuals.

Then we arrived to the Holocaust memorial! It was huge! The guide told us that it is bigger than two soccer fields together. And even though the designer of the memorial didn't want to have any symbolism in the memorial and there were no signs or anything telling it is a memorial, it was impressive. When we were walking in the middle of the concrete cubes the feeling was a bit distressing. Definitely worth seeing!

After that we walked to the Brandenburger Tor. The guide told us about the history of the monument and also something about the surroundings. There we took also a group picture!

Then we walked to the Rathaus, meaning the parliament house. In our eyes it looked more like a church or a castle :D We wouldn't mind working there..

On our way there..

After that we took a bus to Berlin Hauptbahnhof and then a train to see the Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall). We went to see the longest piece left from the wall. It is over 1 kilometer long and full of different paintings and graffiti.

The wall was impressive, but lower than we expected. Someone skilled would easily climb over it. The guide told us that yeah, you could have climbed it but then you would have been shot because the "no-mans-land" in between the walls was all the time guarded.

Picture from Hélèna

Most popular painting, made from a picture so this really happened

Then we took again the tram and went to Kreuzberg, which is a urban area filled with different restaurants and boutiques. The guide recommended us to go and have dinner there and named some specific places :) We decided to go to Kreuzburger, which reputedly has the best burgers in town. And yeah, they were good and really cheap! You got the burger, fries and a drink for 7 €.

The last sightseeing we wanted to see was Checkpoint Charlie. It used to be the entrance for important and popular people to go from west to east side of Berlin. There were two "soldiers" standing and having pictures with tourists. It cost 2 € to take one picture with them. We were just thinking that the guys must have been models instead of soldiers :D

Overall, Berlin was great! It was a huge city and unfortunately we didn't have enough time to see everything we would have wanted to. We need to visit it again sometimes :)
The atmosphere in Berlin was totally different than in Köln. Of course Berlin was bigger, the buildings were higher, streets wider and so on, but all in all people too were different from Köln. In our opinion Berlin had more young people, urban atmosphere and it didn't feel that safe (even though nothing bad happened). Köln feels more traditional and maybe also richer. Köln is just perfect size and cozy. And the architecture is more beautiful here! At least in the old eastern side of Berlin some houses were quite horrible. Like in Tuira (a stadtmittel=area in Oulu) :D :D

Next post will be about our birthday party!

Bis später!
Maiju&Jenna

Berlin, part 1

Hallo!

Last weekend we traveled to Berlin with a group of 23 people from our school. The trip was organized by our school's Corporate Identity Team. The trip cost 120€ and it included bus transfer, accommodation and a city tour.

We were supposed to leave on Friday morning at 7, but of course there was some difficulties...everybody else was on time ready to leave except our trip organizer, it turned out that he had overslept :D Eventually we left for Berlin 45 minutes later than scheduled. The journey to Berlin took about 9 hours instead of the normal 8 hours because of traffic jam near Berlin. Luckily we got some sleep so it wasn't so bad!

We arrived to our hostel which was very centrally located at Alexanderplatz in the city center. The hostel was called One80° and it was actually really nice, better than we expected. Our rooms were for 4 people and each of them had own toilet and shower.

Our room from the door

Lobby, reception, bar and restaurant :D

Everybody waiting for the city tour to start

First thing after arriving to Berlin was to get food! Some of us decided to go to a restaurant. We had no idea where we were, so we just wandered around and found a nice pizzeria near the hostel. By the way eating in a restaurant here in Germany is much cheaper than in Finland. We ordered six meals and drinks and it all cost 66€. The pizza and pasta were really good!

Jenna, Maiju, Marion, Hélèna, Omar and Pim

After eating we headed back to the hostel, since we had a pub crawl planned for us at 8. We walked to the first bar where the whole thing started. Of course we made a little circle walking there, because why not...:D Levent didn't want to admit that he was lost, but of course we figured it out! Eventually we found the bar and then we needed to pay 12€ to participate in the crawl. The twelve euros included a free beer, free shots and entrance to a club. We thought that it was only going to be our group for the pub crawl but actually there was a lot of people! In our opinion it wasn't that awesome...we didn't get the free shots in every bar, we don't drink beer (:D), when we got the shots they weren't that good, there were so many of us that the pubs were crowded and hot...just a little bit of complaining :D nevertheless we had a good time and it was something different to a normal night! Our night ended to a club called Matrix. It was huge and nicely decorated. There were three different areas with specific music genres. We really liked the place, too bad that we were too tired to stay there long. We left the club around 2 and went to sleep. 

Our stay at the hostel included a breakfast. We decided to go and have breakfast together at 10. The food was okay, nothing that special. Then we had some free time before the city tour at 2. We wanted to go shopping so we had an efficient 30 minutes of shopping. Jenna found two knits from Mango and Maiju found jeans and earrings from Tally Weijl. Then we had the city tour, but we are gonna tell more about that in a separate post!

In the evening we gathered together in one room at our hostel. We drank a couple of drinks there, even though it wasn't allowed...:D Around 10 we left to find a club which some people walking in the street recommended us. Eventually when we got there after taking two metros and walking a lot, it turned out that there was a beatboxing competition going on.. So we didn't go in. :D At that point one of us had drank a bit too much alcohol so we needed to take that person back to the hostel.. When we left the hostel again we had been walking over two hours. It really didn't go like in the movies :D So we just decided to walk to a nearest bar and stay there. We found one from Alexanderplatz! It wasn't a club, actually it was built in a tent but we had fun there. Again around 2 we decided to go to sleep. 

Pim the captain!

Martyna, Pim, Jenna, Maiju and Hélèna

On Sunday morning we had breakfast already at 9, we struggled a bit waking up but we had to eat :D The checkout from the hostel was already at 10 which we found a bit weird. We left back to Köln after 10 and arrived here after 6. The journey again wasn't that bad, we got some sleep and it went quickly. 

The next post is about our sightseeing tour in Berlin, generally about Berlin and the atmosphere there!

Tschüss!

Jenna&Maiju