30 straight

The second day of the program we started at the tv tower and took a long bike ride through east Berlin. The tour guides were explaining to us how rapidly the neighborhood has been changing, notably before and after 1989. When the wall came down, almost everyone living in the east moved to the west, but others recognized an opportunity to acquire property for very cheap. Now the east has more hipster, young neighborhoods because of the low price compared to the west.

Biking around the city was an enlightening experience. We crossed Admirals Bridge and Gorlitzer Park, where immigrants from Africa loiter and sell drugs. We later biked at Tempelhof, an abandoned airport where thousands of Syrian refugees live. Locals were biking down the runway, walking their dogs, gardening and watering plants, playing sports, running, having a picnic.

We ate a doner, the equivalent of our taco bell in Berlin, except a doner kebab is a delicious, Turkish sandwich made from meat cooked on a vertical skewer and rotated around. In fact, the word doner comes from the Turkish word donmek, to turn or rotate.
http://www.abandonedberlin.com/2015/03/tempelhof-mother-of-all-airports.html

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2010-04-11-germany-doner-kebab_N.htm

Around 10 pm we took the S-Bahn across town to a club called about blank. We waited in line for what felt like an eternity, and we were the only ones talking and having a good time. Everybody else just didn’t look like they wanted to be there. We were definitely those loud obnoxious Americans. Also every guy was wearing a black shirt or jacket. I stuck out, being the one guy wearing a white shirt. When we got the front, the bouncer asked us how many we were. With our blatantly American accents, we said we were 5. He kind of gave us a hint, he asked “Are you SURE you all 5 are together?” When we all cluelessly looked at each other and nodded our heads, he apologized and told us to leave.

The second club we went to, Sisyphos, was apparently even more exclusive. We changed up the game plan, and separated into three groups. This time, we tried to look slumped and depressed, you know, as if we were just too cool for this place. I talked to the bouncer with a French accent, and sure enough, it worked.

We get in there and there are several techno rooms across the club and an outdoor bar with way overpriced beverages. Everyone in the club was dancing, just going to their own beat, nobody was trying to one up anybody with some dance move. It’s like they were in their own world. Much different than clubs in the US, where dancing is more social and people dance in a circle together, instead of wandering off for their private solos. We danced and lost track of the time. I exited one of the dancing rooms to find the sunrise blaring down on me. It was 6:30 when Greg and I left the club. Time for bed, except. . . we had another tour scheduled starting in a few hours. The grueling life of a foreign exchange student in Berlin. 

We were wandered around the deserted streets of Berlin. It looked like a scene from the walking dead. We knew that if we took a nap, we would only be more tired, so we searched for a jolt in the form of nicotine. We walked into a tiny convenience store where there were a few other guys who were doing the same thing we were, running away from sleep. We bought cigars and talked with these guys for about an hour and a half. We talked about everything, from sports and sharing stories, to discussing the economic and refugee situation in Germany and comparing governments.

We finished our cigars and said our farewells, then arrived back to the hotel around 9:30. We ate breakfast and left for the walking tour at 10:30. Everything was going well. I was a lot more awake than I had expected. We walked over to the Brandenburg gate and all of a sudden I hit a brick wall. The need for sleep had finally caught up to me. We then walked to the Holocaust Memorial where we walked through a series of imposing, high-standing columns next to each other. Walking through it made me feel anxious and on guard because the turns were so tight. I thought I would run into someone, and I kept losing sight of the others in my group. The tour guide mentioned that feeling was common, and that Holocaust victims felt like constantly.

We got back to the hotel around 3 pm. I slept on impact upon crashing the bed.