Berlin

So this weekend we decided to make a trip to Berlin with our new bus passes. We left early Saturday morning, and yes early means before 7 am. We arrived and headed to the Berlin design festival. It was very cool despite all the hipsters. The exhibition seemed composed of all very young designers work which was cool. The work itself was very on the artistic side of design which was interesting to see. After getting our fill of design we headed out to see the city. We had some dinner and of course watched the world cup while eating with the endless televisions set up to watch it on. After dinner we went and found our hostel which seemed almost too nice to be a hostel. After that we headed out to this old apartment complex that has been turned into basically a squatters place for artists who pay I think one euro a week in rent, ha. It was very neat, not sure if I could live there though like I'm told some of the people do.

This concluded the end of the daytime and it was time to head out. We found an English bar to watch the England vs. USA game. We were vastly outnumbered to say the least. During the national anthem I was singing pretty much as loudly as I could while getting cursed at and booed, awesome. That only inspired Chet, Will, and I to chant louder and more often during the game. Chants such as

"Drink some tea" clap clap clap "Eat some Crumpets" clap clap clap

"You've got bad teeth" clap clap clap "You've got bad teeth"

Just an example of a few of them, it seemed almost to easy to make fun of them, ha. To my surprise most people seemed to be really cool about it and most everybody realized it was all in good fun and we were getting taunted as well. One example

"Hey you can't do that he's too close to the end zone."

Anyways that was fun. The next day we spent walking around in the park, we visited the Berlin wall, and then it was game time again. This time it was the opening game for Germany. We went to the public viewing put on by FIFA. There was probably somewhere from 40,000 to 60,000 people there hard to tell when you're in the middle of the swarm. After the game we caught the train home around 1 am and got back at 5:30 am just in time for class at 9 am, ha.

Berlin overall was a very cool city. Seemed very down to earth and not packed with tourists. The town feel was very blue collar, which I liked. We will probably be going back.