We call our apartment “The Panopticon” because it has large front windows with no curtains that look out over a courtyard surrounded by tall apartment buildings.
The morning after our first night in Berlin, we went downstairs to the hotel breakfast buffet at 6am. Starved and still aching from our travels, we enjoyed a refreshing breakfast of bread, fruit, and a selection of meats and cheeses. However, the stark modernist decor and graffiti murals that covered the walls combined with the pulsing electronic music blaring through the speakers gave the morning a decidedly German feel.
Our first night in Berlin, we arrived after over 20 hours of travel… and discovered we had had a miscommunication with our landlord. He was not at the apartment to let us in, and we had no way of contacting him because we hadn’t been able to get our new SIM cards for our phones. With no where to stay and no idea where we were in a city of strangers and meager German skills, we finally found a cab driver who didn’t speak English who pointed to a hotel across the street from the apartment. Apparently in our fatigue we had walked right past it. We checked in, and after some wrangling over WiFi, we tracked down the landlord and got the keys to the apartment. However, we opted to stay in the hotel that night, since he informed us we wouldn’t have internet for almost a week. We got our first taste of German television and were introduced to our new favorite tv personality, “Bernd das Brot”, who is a depressed loaf of bread puppet and absolutely hilarious.
Field kit is (mostly) assembled! I’m not buying paper until I get to Germany. It’s too heavy. Everything else was INSANELY more expensive there (the Prismacolor pencils were $19 here $47 in Germany!) I’ve got my army engineers bag and I am ready to go!