Kassel and Berlin

The minute we arrived in Kassel, we knew we would have a good time. We went to visit Rachel`s friend Patrick, who she met in Montana but hadn't seen in almost a year. He greeted us with a 30 pack of Beck's beer (in true MT fashion). We dropped our stuff off at Patrick's house, including the bright blue garbage bags of wet clothes. Luckily there was enough room to hang everything up. Patrick has a year-long internship in Kassel and is living with a host family for the next month. His host mom and siblings speak nearly zero English, and Patrick speaks very little German, so dinner was interesting--although they all seemed very nice! Then we went to the apartment of Patrick's colleague to watch the FIFA Confederation Cup final between Brazil and Spain. We met a few people from Spain, one from Brazil, and one from Germany. By 3:30 am on a Sunday night, we figured it was time to sleep.

Yesterday we got a "guided tour" of Kassel, which despite being mostly demolished during WWII still had some beautiful sights. The main attraction in Kassel is (fittingly) a castle that overlooks the whole city and has waterfalls cascading down from the top of the hill to the city below. We spent most of the day wandering around this site and wondering why Patrick felt the need to run up and down the hill as a work out. After eating dessert and then two dinners, we felt it was time to make the journey to Berlin, where we had a hostel booked.

This is where the trip went awry--it really gets less surprising every time. We got on the 9:40 pm train to Berlin with the intent of arriving at 12:30 am. Since the hostel is only a 15 minute bus ride from the main train station, we figured arriving at 12:45 am was not totally unreasonable. We checked into our hostel at 4:30 am. Here's why:

1. The train was delayed and arrived to Berlin Hauptbahnof at 1:30 am. 

2. The directions to the hostel applied only during the day, so we had to ask a help desk which night bus to take.

3. The help desk told us the wrong night bus to take.

4. Buses apparently do not drive in circuits, so we were kicked off the end of the wrong bus line at 3:15 am. 

5. By the time we got on the right bus, the night buses ended. We were only two stops away from where we needed to be when it happened.

6. No other buses ran to our stop at 4:30 am, so we finally hailed a cab for the final 5 minute drive. 

7. We are the most unlucky travelers in Europe, and apparently Germany has had enough of us.

After falling asleep by 5 am, we forced ourselves to wake up at 9:30 so as not to miss our free breakfast. These things are very important to us, especially at this point in the trip. We immediately went back to sleep and woke up at 1:30 to explore the city. This ended up being perfect, because apart from museums (which we are just not meant for) and the zoo (which is expensive), we were able to see everything we wanted to within a few hours.

We began by going to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Luckily we had read a little bit about it, which gave us a bigger appreciation for the structure itself in addition to its meaning. It is actually a very controversial memorial, because a company hired to weatherproof the pieces actually produced the Zyklon B gas used in gas chambers. This was not revealed until after the construction had begun, and it was decided that it would be too expensive to undo the progress that had been made. In addition, there have been many complaints that the memorial gives the impression that Jews were the only people murdered, when in reality many other groups were persecuted. Overall, it was very profound, along with a description that stated the memorial was "designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere and the whole structure aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason."

From there we ventured to the Brandenburg Gate, which stands next to where the former Berlin Wall was. The gate was mostly destroyed in WWII, but was refurbished and is now a well known site in Germany. It is the entry to Unter den Linden, a street lined with linden trees that used to lead to the Prussian palace.

Only a block away is the Reichstag building, where the Bundestag (modern German Parliament) meets. Until 1933, the Reichstag met there, and since then it has been through a fire and war before being restored to today's use.

We then spent a couple of hours wandering through Tiergarten. Europeans sure love their public gardens (and so do we)! It would be so nice to have these at home...minus the pockets of nudist colonies.

On one edge of the Tiergarten is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, which was constructed after the controversy surrounding the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

After some more wandering, we had an amazing (and cheap!) dinner of a donor kebap and a falafel donor. We succumbed to the cheap German shopping down the street for a while before meandering back to our hostel for the night. We are off to Brussels tomorrow!