After having a very rough first 10 days in Berlin, I decided to run away from home and hit my reset button. I hopped on a train for Hamburg because it was the closest city to Berlin and took me closer to Bremen, which was one of the cities I intended on visiting. Any attempt at exploring Hamburg was thwarted by the extreme blisters I had developed and general fatigue from my travels. I decided to use the day as a day of rest and spent most of my time in my hotel watching German television.
The second week didn’t go much better than the first. We had great difficulty getting our phones to work and found out we wouldn’t have internet for over a week. With no internet, not tv, no books, no music, and little else to entertain us, we tried to explore the city as much as possible, but I ended up with blisters so bad I actually wondered if I was going to have to seek medical intervention (people with MS have to be careful of such things, just like diabetics.) The week ended with me having a bit of a nervous breakdown and running away to Hamburg without telling my roommate where I was going. Not the most considerate thing, but the situation was complicated and at that moment he was part of the problem.
Habt Ehrfurcht vor dem Baum, er ist ein einziges großes Wunder, und euren Vorfahren war er heilig. Die Feindschaft gegen den Baum ist ein Zeichen von Minderwertigkeit eines Volkes und von niederer Gesinnung des einzelnen.
Have reverence for the tree, it is one big miracle, and to your ancestors it was holy. The hostility to the tree is a sign of the inferiority of a people and of the low mentality of the individual.
Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt
(1769 – 1859), German naturalist, founder of biogeography