Introduction to Germany

Lindsay and I lounged in my room while I repacked and we both recovered from our overnight journeys. We packed up the car, picked up Rey and stopped for food (at the gas station, of course, it is the Saturday after Christmas and the world here is extra closed although it is only noon). We headed up to Nurnberg for a late lunch. I had looked up one of the oldest surviving pubs in Europe and we thought of all the mid-Germany cities, this one had the most history and was most worth stopping at. It was a (comparatively) short drive and we wandered around the ancient city a bit before we found a half door that, had the restaurant been open, we could have crawled into and had some hearty German fare and a pint or two. Oops they don’t call them pints, I mean a liter or two (although that is kind of a lot…). We eventually found what seemed to be the Friday’s of Germany (although this was the only one and it was started in the 1300’s the waitresses wore costumes so we decided it was like Friday’s) and got all the good stuff: lager, pretzels, liver ball soup, beef cheeks, boiled ham leg. Lindsay tried to get a vegetarian pie thing, but it was covered in cheese sauce, cheese sauce made of what appeared to be exclusively ham….and so the Euro diet begins for Linds. Everyone had warned her, but I'm not sure anything could have prepared her for ‘vegetarian’ including not just cheese sauce, but ham…

We got a little lost getting back to the car, but eventually made it not only back into the warm little seats but all the way up to Berlin. I took a short nap in the back seat to get ready for the tangle that was looming to the north on the GPS, but much to our surprise I only had to do one U-turn. What lie in store for us, however, was an even bigger surprise. I had booked us a room in the Berlin Vacationer’s Penitentiary. 

I guess a one-star hotel really means it is lacking amenities…like heat, towels, the correct number of beds, walls that aren’t covered in large pastel shapes. The first night was bad, 3 of us stacked in the double bed (which was split in the middle, revealing the wooden bed frame to my back), but the second night, when my friend (and our Berlin tour guide) Toby stayed over, it was just funny.

In our tours during the day, along with what felt like the majority of the city, we found an amazing hotel, which beckoned me in with this sign, which I could have sworn they wrote just for me (and I reckon I am not the only one)

We switched to this hip, classy joint and liked it (well, and Berlin) so much, we ended up staying two more nights. We needed to rest our bones a bit and this city was perfect. We wandered, I ate the best kebab ever at 3am and got my hair cut (which, by the way, has turned me into a poor American imitation of a Euro-hipster, which is terrifying, although Lindsay and Rey say its not all that bad). We didn’t do much sightseeing past that first day with Toby, but Berlin is more like a city I would live in, so it felt right to do more living kinds of things like afternoon naps and haircuts.

We woke up on Wednesday and it was snowing. The heavens knew we had driving to do!