The Marathon: Malaga II

Of course, it started to rain while we were landing in Malaga. The marathon was kicking us while we were down again. One of the reasons we were going to stay in Malaga an extra night was to see the processiones. Spain is an incredibly catholic country, and the influence can be seen pretty strongly during Semana Santa (“Holy Week”), the week preceding Día de la Resurreción (Easter). They have huge processions of Catholic imagery and parades of people in repentance and celebration of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. It’s really fascinating, you should Google image them and check out what they look like. It’s a lot of fanfare and can sometimes be more about who’s Church or brotherhood had the most money and the best procession, and not the religion itself (there are A LOT of people, though, who do take it to have a religious significance). My point is that the processiones do not proceed if it’s raining. The images are extraordinarily heavy and huge; it’s dangerous for them to proceed when it’s raining. When we got to the hostel they had confirmed that some of them had been cancelled earlier in the week because of the rain.

We just went to the grocery store to buy some food and made pasta in the hostel kitchen, hoping that the rain would let off and it would become dry enough for them to proceed. We showered and crawled into bed. Sona, Maya, and I were in a 8 person room and Conrad and Jake were in a separate 6 person room. The three of us passed out early, and never even heard our roommates come home. We never did make it out to see the processiones, which apparently did end up happening that night. A couple of them were able to proceed that evening, but not all of them. Jake and Conrad went to see them, but the three girls were passed out early. We were absolutely drained from the journey.

We started off the next day with a trip to the Museo Picasso Malaga. Picasso was born in Malaga and his daughter-in-law and grandson donated a large collection of his works to the city of Malaga to create a museum. We were lucky and got in for free with out Euro under 26 cards. Once again we saw the German influence on Malaga, the museum guides were in Spanish, English, and German. The museum itself was actually pretty cool too. There were a ton of “I’m pretty sure I could have drawn that at 5” paintings and other Picasso works. He was one of the most influential artists of the 20^th century, and some of the artwork was truly unique. I had already seen Guernica in the Reina Sofia, and it was interesting to see more of his work.

I really like one of the quotes we saw on the walls. Picasso referenced a Spanish saying: “Obras son amores y no buenas razones. Lo que cuenta es lo que se hace y no lo que se tenia la intencion de hacer.” It basically translates to: Love is deeds, not good reasons. What counts is what you do, not what you have the intention to do.

We walked along the beach a little afterwards to kill sometime before our train left at 6:20. It was actually pretty dirty and not the nicest beach. Us Californians are quite the beach critiques, but it truly wasn’t a fantastic beach. It was, however, nice to finally be at a beach again (even it did have a bunch of Germans trying to tan on it).

A 55 minute train ride that afternoon and I was finally back to Córdoba. My piso (apartment) has never felt more home-like and comforting as it did when I first sat on my bed Saturday afternoon. I was finally going to be able to sleep in a room alone and not wonder whether or not the sheets were truly clean or if I was going to miss a flight in the morning…

Makes me kind of ready for the same feeling when I get back to California.

The Marathon: Train Hopping

We were to take a train to Berlin that would arrive around 12:23 in the evening in Berlin. We were going to store our things in the train stations by the airport where we were to arrive and then spend the evening in Berlin, before taking our early morning Ryanair flight from Berlin back to Malaga. The entire time we were in the Heineken factory we couldn’t remember what time our train tickets were for. Maya and Sona had left our tickets in our lockers at the train station, so we were unable to check them during the day. No one could remember, we thought 2:30, 4:30, 5, 5:45, or 6:45. We started on our trek across Amsterdam (the factory was about a 30 minute walk from the station) making as few stops as possible. We went in a McDonalds to grab food to eat on the train and stopped quickly in a souvenir shop for postcards and things. When we got to the train station, Maya, Jake and Sona went to our lockers to get our things and I went to the bathroom. When I came out I saw them all completely distressed. It was 5:19 and our tickets said 5:21. We sprinted back and forth through the station looking for the train to Hilversum, and eventually we asked someone at information. He said there was one leaving in 3 minutes, at 5:26, from platform 10b. We raced over there and hopped on the train.

I took a closer look at our ticket (which was all in German) and tried to figure out what it said. At the top it said Amsterdam Centraal – Berlin Flügensomethingorother and at the bottom it had two directions: 5:21 Hilversum-Wolfsburg and 22:00 Wolfsburg – Berlin. I realized it first, we were meant to be on a train leaving Hilversum at 5:21, not arriving in Hilversum at 5:41 (which the train we were on was scheduled to do). This was when it hit us, we had missed our train and we were on the wrong train. We were officially lost in a foreign country. We asked a nice looking Dutch guy about where our train was headed, and he said Amersooft, and the next stop was Hilversum. We told him we were headed to Berlin and showed him our ticket. He confirmed our fears, we had missed our train, and then offered us advice on how to get to Berlin. He said that direct trains to Berlin frequently left from Amersooft, and there was usually one at 8. We thanked him perfusely and he got off on that stop with us, instead of Hilversum as we intended. He walked us to the information desk and made sure we were okay. It was another fine example of friendly Europeans helping us out.

When we got up to the lady at the information desk, we told her we had a problem. We had missed out train to Berlin and we showed her our tickets. She looked into her system for trains to Berlin, and said the next one didn’t leave until the next morning. We were devastated. Sona looked like the world had ended. This was when we truly thought we were not going to make our flight, that we would be stuck in this random train station in the middle of the Netherlands with no concrete way to make it back to Germany, let alone Spain. She told us that our best bet was to head to Hengelo, the last Dutch town before the border, and hope that their computer systems could find us a way to Berlin, because she couldn’t see trains past the border. We asked her if we needed to buy tickets for the train, and she just kind of shrugged at us and said something along the lines of don’t ask don’t tell. She was going to pretend she didn’t know our tickets weren’t technically valid. Such is the Dutch way I guess.

We sat in the station for 45 minutes before catching the train to Hengelo. It was about an hour train ride to Hengelo, and about halfway through a man came through checking tickets. I thought, here it is, were going to get caught without a ticket and were would be heavily fined and kicked off the train in some obscure Dutch city. When he got to me I sheepishly handed him my ticket and smiled. All he said to me was that I had a second-class ticket and needed to switch out of the first class cabin at the next stop. I absolutely love the Dutch. Sona, Jake, Maya, and I moved over at the next stop, thrilled to still be allowed on the train. Tickets got checked one more time on that journey, and we were even more overjoyed to make it through round 2 without fines or being ejected.

The train we had been on had internet, so I had been keeping Andrew updated on what had been happening, and when we got to Hengelo, I lost internet. The last thing Andrew heard from me for about 12 hours (when I got to the hostel in Malaga) was that I was arriving in some random Dutch city with far off hopes of reaching Berlin in time. I still feel bad for leaving him hanging like that. I bet my parents are pretty happy I didn’t worry them like that too…

When we arrived in Hengelo we went straight to the information kiosk and asked the woman how to get to Berlin. She asked us when, and we said as soon as possible. She just looked at us like we were nuts and then did some typing on her computer. She stoically wrote some things down and then typed some more. Then she handed us a plan with three train changes and a final arrival time in Berlin of 4:49. She wished us luck and looked at us like we were crazy for doing this. We were going to get to Berlin 4 hours later than originally planned, but we were so excited that it looked like we were going to get to Berlin on time, we finally had a plan. We didn’t allow ourselves to celebrate yet, there were too many things that could still go wrong (for example, our tickets were still not valid and we could easily miss a train) but a weight was still lifted off my shoulders.

After another hour or so wait we caught our 20 minute train to Bad Benthiem, the German town just across the border. We didn’t get our tickets checked on this one either, and we actually had no idea when we really did cross the border. That actually was probably one of the greatest gifts of the Shengen Pact, we didn’t have to get our passports or documents checked crossing the border (which was a negative when we realized early we wouldn’t get any passport stamps from these cool countries, which is the whole point of traveling, right? Stamps?) .

When we got to Bad Bentheim we had a 45-minute wait for our train to Blithefeld. While I was waiting, I got a papercut writing a postcard. The marathon was just kicking me while I was down. I was tired, disoriented, and in a foreign country, and now my finger was bleeding. More importantly though, this train ride went smoothly as well. It was around two hours. About halfway through the ride, the lady came through checking tickets. I had fallen asleep, and when everyone woke me up to show her mine, I kind of aimlessly handed it to her. She looked at it and just handed it back. We made it through round 3 with our invalid tickets and were just as happy as we were the first time. The entire ride I was actually a little worried we would miss our stop because we were all falling asleep. It ended up not being a problem and we got off at Blithefeld.

When we got to the station, the first thing we did was look for the location of our next train, which was leaving at 00:23. All we could find for that time was an overnight train leaving for Warsaw. There wasn’t one leaving for Berlin until 3:30. We started to get a little worried around midnight and went to the platform of the Warsaw train to look around. We found the plan for the train and discovered that the train split partway through the journey. One coach was headed to Amsterdaam, two were headed to Warsaw (continuing to Moscow), and the last two were headed to Prague. Apparently last two were stopping in Berlin at 4:49 on the way to Prague. When the train arrived, we hopped into the D coach and discovered that there were no seats, only cabins with beds. Uh oh. We walked down to Cabin E and then back to D not finding anywhere to sit. Jake went up to a woman working on the train and asked he how to get to Berlin. She told us our tickets weren’t valid for this train, but led us up to the first cabin and told us to find seats (these had cabins of 6 seats instead of beds). Sona and I found seats in one cabin and Jake and Maya found seats in another. I was freaking out. Berlin Hbf was listed on the windows of coaches D & E but not on the window of ours, A. I was so scared that we were going to end up back at Amsterdam. I got off the train at the stop where they were detaching the coaches and double checked with the lady that we got to Berlin at around 4:30. I came back and made Sona anxious too, and she doubled checked with her shortly after that our coach was headed to Berlin. I slept for maybe an hour and a half on the 4 hour ride because I was so anxious. It was like I could not believe that we were actually going to make it to Berlin on time, especially without paying a dime extra. I thought for sure that something else HAD to go wrong, that there was no way we could be that lucky.

Apparently we were that lucky and at 5:15 we arrived at Berlin Hauphbenhauf. We bought our 3€ ABC metro tickets and navigated the metro to the airport (watching the sun rise for the 3^rd time this trip). This time of night/morning was a strange time to be on the metro. Most of the people on it were wasted because they were on their way home from partying, were certifiably crazy, or homeless. It was an interesting metro trip. Eventually we made it to the airport. Surprisingly, we made it to the airport too early to even go through security; we were there three hours before our flight left. We sat in a café and wrote some postcards before heading through security and waiting some more before they posted the gate number. We boarded our flight with ease and were eventually on our way to Malaga. We got to our hostel around 3:30pm thrilled to finally be there, but too exhausted from the traveling to even conceive of celebrating.

Another thing that was extremely lucky for us was the level of English in all of the Northern European countries we visited. Nearly everyone spoke English and most spoke it with a proficiency that I know I could never achieve in Spanish, not matter how long I studied it. We are so lucky that them women at the kiosks, the Danish guy, and the lady on the train in Germany spoke English; otherwise we may never have made it to Berlin. Let alone every other encounter in these foreign countries. Living in a country where they don’t speak my native language has been difficult, with a lot of miscommunications, but my travels this break has made me really appreciate the level of Spanish I do have. At least here, when I look at the menu, I have some idea of what I’m ordering. In Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, we had to just hope or assume they spoke English. They usually did too, with perfect fluency.

The Marathon: Amsterdam

We arrived in Amsterdam around 10pm, and the city was bustling. There were people everywhere. One of the things we noticed about Amsterdam, right from the start, was that there were more tourists than anything else. We could hardly tell who was a tourist and who wasn’t. It was a lot harder to get a feel for tourist culture vs. the local culture. I suppose with Amsterdam they’re too integrated to feel the difference.

We checked into our hostel, Hostel Cosmos, once we finally found it. It was off a couple side streets and had a small sign above the door. It was tiny little family run place with a couple rooms. There were four rooms on two floors with anywhere from 4-9 beds. For the first night we all stayed in the same four-person room and then the following night Jake had to stay in a 6 person room and the three girls stayed in a 9-person room. It was teeny tiny and super compact. The stairs were incredibly skinny and steep. They had some of the comfiest beds that we slept in but the bathroom felt like an airplane bathroom.

We just got some French fries and went to bed (exhausted after the travel to and from the airports, as well as the flight itself). There were French fry stands EVERYWHERE and they all had dozens of sauce options to chose from. We ended up eating way to many French fries this trip than necessary. Amsterdam, for obvious reasons, has a lot of munchie fast food style food stands. The most common were these French fry stands, and they were all so tasty and were steak cut style. For about 3€ Maya, Sona, and I would split a large French fry with ketchup.

We woke up decently early to take a free 3-hour walking tour of the city (aka tips based). Our tour guide was a cool Sweedish man who had gone to university in the states and moved to Amsterdam just over a year ago. He clearly loved this city. One of the first things he told us was “if you find yourself bored in Amsterdam, there is something wrong with YOU, not with Amsterdam.” The first question he asked us was “What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Amsterdam?” The most popular responses were “weed” and “prostitutes.” Just to play a devil’s advocate of sorts, someone said the architecture. The point of his tour was to give us a different view of the city, to teach us a little bit of the city’s history and the citizens values. He emphasized the city’s tolerance a lot, and expressed it through their allowance of weed (although illegal) as well as the February strike in favor of the Jewish community during WWII. He also talked to us about the “Dutch way of doing things.” The first example he gave of this was the odd structure of most of the buildings, they all leaned pretty far forward. The reason behind this was that because the city was on the water, all goods had to be stored in the attic instead of the basement, because of all the flooding. The staircases are all incredibly narrow, so they used to use a pulley system to pull the packages up to the attic from the front of the houses. In order to keep the packages from scraping the buildings, they built them to tilt. He said it would have been easier to just have the pulleys hang further out from the house, but such is the dutch way. The other example he gave took place right after the Netherlands became an officially protestant country, thereby making Catholicism illegal. One particular group of Catholics, about 400, continued to meet in a normal building. All of the Amsterdamers could hear the mass every Sunday, and reported it to the police. The officers said they don’t work on Sundays, so when they went to investigate on Monday, they never heard anything. This was the Dutch way, to tolerate the Catholicism, even though it was technically illegal. He said the Dutch really care for three things: discretion, if it doesn’t hurt anyone, and if its good for business. He applied this to the weed sale. Technically the sale of marijuana is illegal in Amsterdam, but as long as its discrete (all those establishments say “coffeeshop,” not advertising marijuana), it doesn’t hurt anyone (you can’t technically overdose on marijuana and die, like you can with alcohol), and its good for business (clearly, by all the tourists) they let it continue. The same thing applied to the Catholics, they were discrete, they weren’t hurting anyone, and persecuting the Catholic merchants would just drive away business.

Buddiest temple -1999

We ended the tour in an open plaza out front of a church. He told us how this was the church from which Anne Frank heard the bells every Sunday while hiding in the secret Annex. Here he told us how, once the non-Jews of Amsterdam hear about the deportations of the Jewish community, the people of Amsterdam organized a protest. During the February strike, thousands of Amsterdamers marched through the city protesting the treatment of the Jews. Trams and buses didn’t run and business stopped for days. Eventually the strike was crushed and the deportations increased in speed as a result, but it showed that the Amsterdamers at least stood up for their Jewish neighbors. The other interesting this in this square was the homomonument. It was dedicated to all the homosexuals who have been persecuted and discriminated against through history. It specifically focused on during the holocaust, as most monuments and memorials are dedicated specifically to the Jewish population and not the other groups who were targeted, like the Roma, gypsy, and homosexual populations. It was another example he gave of the city’s famous tolerance.

After his tour we stopped and got some food before paddle boating. We had no idea where the paddle boating rentals took place, so we crossed the city to Amsertdam Centraal station to find a rental locations. They then directed us to the other side of the city to their rental location. By the time that we found them, they had closed about 10 minutes earlier. After an hour and a half of walking, we ended our fruitless quest. All the walking did help me to appreciate the city. Amsterdam has the most canals of any European city (even Venice) and it made the city gorgeous. It always retained a lot of its old architecture. All the buildings were really tall and really skinny. It was definitely the most beautiful city we saw on this trip.

After our failed quest, we just went to a Pancake Bakery next to the Anne Frank Huis to get some famous Dutch pancakes. I got a delicious banana pancake that was huge and covered with cinnamon and powdered sugar. It was absolutely heavenly, I was so happy to eat it. During this whole trip, in each city, someone has been obsessed with trying a certain type of food. In Germany, all Sona wanted to do was try a sausage. In Denmark, all Jake wanted was a Danish. In Amsterdam, I wanted pancakes. Sure enough, first time we had a sit down meal, I dragged us across the city to a pancake place (we were headed to Anne Frank’s house anyways…).

Our next stop was the Anne Frank museum. At one time, the secret annex and the warehouse were going to be sold and demolished by a developer, but the people protested and the city bought the building and it’s neighbor. They preserved the building as it was and had her diary on display. Their living space was absolutely tiny and it was incredible that they all lived in the small annex for years. The museum part also told the stories of each of the habitants of the secret annex and their fates. Only Otto Frank (Anne’s father) survived the war, and he published Anne’s diary so that they world could know what it was like for a Jew during the war. Anne’s dream was to become a writer, and it’s a tragedy that only through her death did she become a famous published author. They never did discover who revealed their location to the secret police.

We ended up getting French fries for dinner (don’t judge) and then headed home. We just hang out for a little before going to sleep. We woke up early the next morning to head to the Van Gogh museum. When we got there, there was a huge line. We waited for almost an hour and a half, taking turns to run to bakeries or food stands for breakfast foods. When we got to the front we discovered it was 14€, which was ridiculous and there was no student discount. We had waited for so long and wanted to see Sunflowers, so we just ate the cost. The museum had around 200 of his works, as well as drawings and other things. They also had a temporary exhibition, called Picasso in Paris, and it was neat to see that too. Picasso and Van Gogh had been contemporaries, so it was nice to see their work together like that.

Then we went to the Heineken Experience, which was very similar to the Guinness factory in Dublin. There was a simulation where we were beer being made and there were lessons on how to properly pour the beer from a tap and drink it correctly. This was out last stop before we had to catch our train to Berlin. This train trip was an adventure in it’s own right…

The Marathon: Copenhagen

Arriving in Copenhagen we saw the second sunrise of the trip (2 too many if you ask me). As soon as we arrived in Copenhagen we had to deal with the next of our great challenges, currency exchange. Denmark has staunchly avoided converting to the Euro, and that left us in a pickle. We had already converted our dollars to Euros (paying an exchange rate) and then we had to convert them again into krons at the airport. I felt like I could see the money just dripping out of my bank account every time we had to purchase something. The coins were pretty cool; they kind of looked like fake money. Copenhagen is already a decently expensive city, without us having to double convert our money.

After dealing with converting, we took the metro (another weird honor system situation) to our hostel, called Sleep in Heaven. Needless to say, there were plenty of jokes about how it was nothing like sleeping in heaven. Especially after we had to pay some absurd amount like 7€ to rent sheets… Copenhagen was actually a really pretty city, and I’m glad Sona pushed for us to add it to our trip. Our first tourist destination was the graveyard with the graves of Hans Christian Anderson (writer of famous fairytales) and Kierkegaard. While we were looking for H. C. Anderson’s grave, an Old Danish man approached us and asked if he could help direct us. He asked us if we knew anything about Denmark, and we kind of shrugged and said “No, that’s why were here.” He started with “Well, the first thing you need to know about Denmark is that we have 4% unemployment.” He also said “We also have really good welfare, the government will pay you to sit around on your couch for 2 years.” He reassured us that they were not communist, and definitely a democracy, somehow implying that the US wasn’t. He managed to make us feel incredibly guilty about not knowing that much about Denmark and only speaking English and some Spanish. He told us about Denmark’s 2 UNESCO world heritage sites, Kronborg Castle in Helsingr and another one site near a Viking museum. Eventually he let us go with the advice to not walk around like a bunch of Americans, hurrying and taking pictures of everything, but to slow down and enjoy everything; to walk slowly through the graveyard and take it all in.

After that encounter of the Danish kind, fresh with the knowledge of how to say good-bye (“favel”) and thank you (“tak”) in Danish, we headed to the center of the city. We crossed a bridge over a beautiful river full of swans. We stopped there to eat our snacks from the grocery store, bread and cheese. What can I say? I always travel in the lap of luxury, and I spare no expense.  Sona directed us to the Rundetaarn (the round tower). It is one of the tallest buildings in Copenhagen and has Europe’s oldest observatory at the top. The round tower has not elevator, so Sona and I climbed the winding, whitewashed spiral walk (aka no stairs). Jake and Maya were exhausted from travel and waited for us at the bottom. We were able to see amazing views of the city.

Afterwards Sona, Maya, and I overpaid for a sandwich and a salad, and then the 4 of us headed back to Sleep in Heaven for another nice siesta. We slept soundly until 5pm, when we headed out again. Sona and Jake had both gotten tips of things to see from friends who had lived in Copenhagen, and both of them suggested we go see the anarchist community of Christiana. It is a small part of town where cars are not allowed (there are 14 parking spots for 800+ residents) and the people generally chose not to pay taxes. It was a weird mix of toontown and Telegraph Ave with huge signs everywhere banning you from taking photos. The community’s only rules are no photos, no fighting, and not hard drugs. It was an interesting part of town to walk through, but we didn’t stick around long.

We stopped at a pizza place for dinner and then ate it at Nyhaven (“Newport” in Danish) along the dock. We saw a beautiful sunset and enjoyed it with some delicious pizza. So delicious that Maya and I had to go back and order another one to split. One quick stop at a bar to try a glass of Danish beer, (when in Denmark, right?) and we went to bed. We were still exhausted from travel and were all asleep by 10.

The next day we were up early to do something I never thought I’d be able to say I’ve done, we were up early to follow the advice of a man in a graveyard. We took an hour train up to Helsingr to see the famous Kronborg Castle. We never would have thought to gone if graveyard man hadn’t suggested it to us, and I’m really glad he did. It was a beautiful castle right on the coast of Denmark; you could clearly see Sweden across the sea. It is the famous castle of Elsinore from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was absolutely stunning and definitely deserved to be a heritage site. We spent hours there looking at it before it was time to head back to the airport.

Once again we took on budget travel and took a Norwegian airlines flight from Copenhagen to Amsterdam. Interesting to note was that no one in the airport, neither airport security nor the airline, checked the id for my boarding pass. I could have had a ticket for “Jane Doe” instead of “Brooke Weisenberger” and no one would have been the wiser. Not the most comforting of thoughts.

The Marathon: Berlin

In order to get to Berlin, we had to take a 3-hour Ryanair flight that left at 6:30am, so, if you’ve ever been on a Ryanair flight, you know it was a fantastic start. If you haven’t you should know that Ryanair has a one carry-on limit (including purses or briefcases) and it is a lot smaller than your normal American sized carry-on (think backpack sized). One of my greatest achievements this trip was making the entire trip with just my Jansport backpack. That’s right, I did an entire 9-day Spring Break trip with just a backpack full of things. We were going to have to take 4 flights with similar one carry-on luggage requirements and I simply did not have the funding to pay 15€ for each flight just for a bag. I did not need extra clothes $85 worth, no way. I hope I never have to achieve such a feat ever again. Going through security has never been so stressful when you need to make everything you own fit in to one bag right before you go through.

Well, we arrived in Berlin around 10am and the next challenge we had to face was figuring out the Berlin metro system. Later we discovered it to be incredibly efficient and useful, but at first glance, it was the most confusing metro system I had ever seen. There was an S-bahn and a U-bahn. One ran aboveground and the other ran underground; they intersected at some stations. We had to buy ABC zone tickets for 3€ for the journey to the hostel. We were really confused for a while, because we didn’t know what to do with our tickets. You didn’t have to go through automated stalls to get on and off the train (like BART or the Madrid metro) and no one was checking tickets on the train. We discovered after that the Berlin metro runs on an honor system. They just expect you to buy tickets and they rarely check. Its only a 40€ fine if you get caught without a ticket during the sporadic times that someone actually walks through the train to check tickets. We rode the metro many times and only had our tickets checked once. Only in Germany could the metro run on an honor system…

After about 45 minutes and 3 train changes, we made it to our stop, Rosenthaler Platz (one of the few stops we could even come close to pronouncing). We got off and could not for the life of us figure out where our street was. We wandered around a busy street corner until some random 70year old German lady approached us and offered us help. She spoke little to no English so we just showed her the street name. She pointed to the street we were on and looked at us like we were crazy. We turned around and could actually see our hostel. We were so exhausted from our crazy travel schedule that we couldn’t see it when it was right in front of us. It had a pretty large sign, it was quite clear Circus Hostel was right there…

We checked-in at reception with a nice German guy, Marion. The reservation was under my name and he asked me if my family was German (Weisenberger being super German, almost as German as my mom’s maiden name, Meyer). I told him that we’re German many generations back and now all the German I speak is counting to 10. I did ask him what my last name meant in German. “Berg” means hill and the “Weisen” part means something along the lines of wise man, or wise old man. Our 8-bed room wasn’t ready yet, so we checked our bags into lockers and began to explore the city.

Our first stop was the Brandenburg gate. It’s essentially the Champ-Elysse of Berlin and used to be the old entrance into the city. It’s the site of many famous Hitler-era marches and was once right alongside the Berlin wall. An interesting side fact is that the US embassy is located right next to the Brandenburg gate. Maya went up to the guard and asked if she could look inside. He sternly told her no, but she could look in. She protested that she was an American and could show her passport, but he still said no. We were a little surprised by the irony of a German national telling US citizens they couldn’t enter their own embassy, but such is life. We just took pictures in front of the sign out front instead. We then wandered over to the nearby Reichstag. It is the seat of the German government. It is a huge, imposing building that was really cool to see.

At this point we are absolutely exhausted and starving, so we decide to get some food and then enjoy one of our favorite Spanish pastimes, the siesta. For lunch the obvious option was Dolores. Dolores was a place we had heard of a long-time ago and was our main food goal for the trip. Dolores is a California-style burrito place. All of us have been craving Mexican food like crazy and the one time we tried a Mexican place in Córdoba it was a disaster, the food did not resemble Mexican food at all. Several Californians had vouched for Dolores as the best burrito place in all of Berlin. We were determined to try it while in Germany. You order Chipotle style there, picking burrito, then meat, then rice type, etc. I got myself a chicken burrito with chipotle sauce. The fire ratings were off, chipotle sauce did not deserve to have 3 flames out of 4 for hotness. Psh. It would be lucky to deserve 2, but Europeans just do not seems to have the same sense for spicy and hot as the rest of us. When we went back a second time a day later, I got the habanero sauce, the hottest with 4 flames, and at least deserved the title of “kind of spicy.” After Dolores I think I may have staved off my Mexican food cravings to a bearable level until I return to California. May have.

Post-siesta (and it was a long siesta) we showered and got ready to take on Berlin at night. We went to a random restaurant and got some pretty good burgers and fries as well as our first German beers. We couldn’t pronounce the name of it to save our life, but we all enjoyed them. When in Rome, do as the Romans, right? When in Germany, drink beer.

We started out the next day early and took the Regional Express train to a town just outside the city called Oranienburg, the location of the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. We were there for a couple hours and it was a chilling experience. It was surreal to see the walls around the camp and the old barracks. There was even building Z, where the cremations took place, and ironic name using the last letter of the alphabet for the prisoner’s last stop. It was a trip that made me nauseous and depressed, but it was something that people need. Humanity’s capacity for horrendous acts of violence has been demonstrated throughout history, from the Spanish inquisition to this concentration camp, which the soviets took over after the war and continued to use it for similar purposes. The most moving parts were the personal stories that we heard on out audio guides, of grueling roll calls and vicious commandants.

Our third day in Berlin started off at the Memorial to the Murdered European Jews and Information Center. What can we say, we like to start our days on a happy note. The memorial is difficult to explain, it is a huge squared with many large concrete stones of differing heights, which are reminiscent of coffins. They are unmarked, to imply that we can never know the real number of murdered Jews as well as never know every person’s name. The information center was also very moving, and had more heart wrenching personal testimonies from holocaust victims and survivors.

Afterwards we headed to one of the most iconic sites in Berlin, the East Side Gallery. It is the largest preserved stretch of the Berlin wall that has been painted on by many different artists. There were some artistic ones that I didn’t understand, and some pretty ones as well. One of my favorite quotes on it said “I painted over the wall of shame so freedom is ashamed no more, inferno ruled too many years, until the people chose the light. I put my faith in you, Berlin, and give to you my colours bright!” –Fulvio Pinna, Italy. It was really hard to look and it and conceive life as a West Berliner, constantly surrounded by these walls. Sona, Maya, and I did what we do best: we took lots of pictures.

Next we wandered to Museum Island, to check out the cool buildings (we were saving museum time for Van Gogh and Picasso). The Berlinner Dom building was gorgeous, and so were some of the museum buildings. We didn’t spend that much time there because we had an early date with the Berlin-Schöenfeld airport the next morning around 7:10am. We woke up at 4:45am Monday morning and were off to our next city!

The Marathon: Malaga

Sona, Jake, Maya, and myself nicknamed our Semana Santa (Spring Break) trip “The Marathon.” We were to have a whirlwind trip across Northern Europe: Berlin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam in nine days, flying in and out of Berlin from Malaga. It was to be a feat of European travel, 4 flights (2 Ryanair, 1 EasyJet, and 1 Norwegian) and 3 train rides. We knew it would be a stressful but fun filled adventure, so we were excited to get started Thursday after our literature exam.

We had to fly in and out of Malaga, a city on the Mediterranean coast of Spain (Costa del Sol), because Córdoba, for all intents and purposes, does not have an airport. Ryanair, being the accommodating airline that it is, changed our flight out of Malaga to 6:30am on Friday morning. It made the most sense to stay a night in a hostel in Malaga the night before, so we could at least be a little more refreshed than taking a train that gets into Malaga at like 2am and bumming it in the airport for a couple of hours. Regardless, we had to wake up at 3:30 in the morning to catch a couple taxis and make it to the airport on time.

We had heard a lot about the city of Malaga from our history teacher, Antonio. He had told us that Malaga was an incredibly touristy city full of Alemans (Germans) vacationing at the beach. He set our standards pretty low for the city, so we were pleasantly surprised to find the city quite pretty, although a little touristy. We did also see a lot of blond-haired Germans there. When we were in the airport, all the signs were in Spanish/English/German, which is not the norm. Most countries have signs in their native language and English. It was a true testament to the large amount of Germans that come to the Costa del Sol every year.

We didn’t really see much of Malaga that day, just a stop at a frozen yogurt place for a snack. Our host families had made us bocadillos (sandwiches) and we sat on our hostel’s terrace to eat them. The terrace had a beautiful view of the nearby cathedral. All in all, Malaga was a nice little rest before we started to run the marathon.