Dubsteppin' Berlin

I was extremely excited to get to Berlin...I mean come onnnnn... Nazi history, rumors of bomb.com kebabs for CHEAP, underground clubs and techno scene...what's not to like??

Megan and I have been very interested to guage our reactions to these larger cities vs. smaller towns, aka Barcelona vs. Sevilla/Vienna vs. Salzburg/Berlin vs...umm...mental note, go to a small town in Germany. Perhaps it is the ease of navigating the smaller towns on foot, although I must admit that an easy metro system REALLY makes a difference. Berlin's metro passed the test even though we butchered the names like WOAH. But this city was just SO big, like Barcelona, that we never felt like we actually came to understand the city--even though we took a city-wide bike tour and saw everything. A main thing with larger cities as well is that the city center is so vast that you can't really see everything without knowing exactly what you want to see and making a point of going there. Maybe our issue was that we didn't want to pay for the museums (now that my student ID is gone... grrr) or additional tours or, well, anything...but I think it really was that we didn't know what we actually wanted to see? Hence spending our second full day in Berlin on a fake beach. They took our waters, which was essentially evil considering our dehydrated, hungover bodies, and we laid out on a "beach" that really was just sand next to a river. The pool located IN the river was cool...looking. Just read Hunger Games and did not move because if I shifted an inch I'd be rubbing up against other greased-down, sweaty bodies. No danke.

Anywhodiddle, aside from the bike tour, the creepy man/woman who ran our hostel (on the phone he sounded like a grandmotherly woman and then showed up a middle-aged man with a swivel in his hips when he walked), the Jewish Museum (I now know everything there is to know on being a Jew...that museum was so comprehensive we ended up getting kicked out because we stayed so long) and the confirmed delicious kebabs (YES), our main experience in Berlin was the DUBSTEP. And the beer. But those two go together, obviously. Our first night out was spent, while eating our noodle boxes, meeting some Germans from Frankfurt: Marcel, Sebastian and Daniel. They were very helpful in assisting us in choosing a cheap, high alcohol content beer (essentially this is how we choose what to drink, and Berlin was FULL of these delish brews) and then proceeded in buying our drinks, getting us lost on the way to the underground club, participating in our photoshoot outside of a random, nontouristy section of the Berlin Wall (BOOYAH), and then dancing the night away with us until 6am the following morning. Megan and I looked at each other and said, "Um, it is fully light outside and people are walking to work. Maybe we should head back" before getting tooootally lost on the way to finding a nearby metro. This was only our first taste of the amazing techno scene because the next day I discovered something called Berlin Summer Rave that was conveniently TONIGHT. HECK. YES. Thank you, karma! This awesome techno festival was held in an abandoned airport easily reachable from a metro stop (thanks again, karma) and had three separate stages in three hangars of the airport for only €25. How I wish I could put these pictures up already so you can see what I am talking about! Needless to say, after only 5 hrs of sleep or so we still managed to dance our hearts out at Megan's first rave experience, hopping up and down like crazies and pushing our way to the front (heck yes, Don, you know that's our style!) before getting back to the hostel around 4am. Exhausting, but exactly the experience I wanted from Berlin!