Day 5- To Berlin

Trains are a bit hard to get used to when you have never ridden one. For instance, you are allowed, unlike in most subways, to move between cars while the train is moving; there are doors at both ends of each car and a canvas cowling protects the space between. However, switching between cars while the train is moving can be a daunting task when you open one door and see the car in front of you bolting and jostling in every direction like part of some Coney Island funhouse, all the while making a grinding, screeching noise roughly like you would expect from shearing metal. For anybody who has never had this experience, watching a doorway in front of you performing the sort of gyrations doorways usually only performed by doorways in "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies can quickly lead to a state of stunned disbelief and thorough confusion as to whether you are really supposed to be doing this. Should any of you be on a train in the future, I assure you this sort of activity by a door is probably normal.

After an evening of trying to sleep on the couchettes (a French word meaning "cheap, vinyl imitations of flophouse bunk beds") in our compartment, we arrived in Berlin alive, something we called refreshed and unsure where we were supposed to get off the train. We exited at what we thought was our station, turned out not to be, but instead was the station we should have been going to, so everything worked out just fine, except for the fact I was the only one who managed to brush his teeth on the train, as I figured we still had a few more minutes, which we did, until we arrived at the station we found out we didn’t want to go to. I think our decision to get off at that station was good, though that is unconfirmed as of press time.

A local girl was looking for tourists leaving the train platform in order to sell them a walking tour. She was originally from another part of Germany though, a place called "Chicago, Illinois". She spoke excellent English, which is good, as it apparently made up for her not knowing the least bit of German. She did her usual work on us, that of plugging the tour and we decided to sign up since we needed to see the city somehow. We then played a game of twenty questions with this girl, asking such pertinent information as, "How do we find a hostel?", "How much German do we need to know to get around?", "Which train station are we at?", "Where can we find some breakfast?", "Where are the lockers here in the train station?", and "Which day of the week is it?". She was able to help us with all of our questions except that last one, as she was also enjoying her vacation, though her vacation was already several months longer than ours.

After breakfast (Fortunately not the traditional German fare of concrete shaped like some sort of bread item), storage of packs in lockers and the use of the cleanest bathrooms on God’s green Earth, we met up with our tour.