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.
Arrived in Berlin after almost 20 hours of travel, only to find we had a miscommunication with our landlord and he was not at the apartment to meet us. After completely losing my mind at what I was going to do with 150lbs of luggage and nowhere to go we discovered a hotel across the street and checked in. 20 minutes later and with the help of my husband, we tracked down the landlord and sorted things out, but stayed at the hotel anyway, as we won’t have internet at the apartment for almost a week. Elliott fetched us some bacon cheeseburgers from the restaurant across the street and we sat and watched unsettling German children’s television before passing out in exhaustion. As much as this was a nefarious start to our trip, I can honestly say I won’t soon forget the few hours I was homeless in Berlin, thousands of miles from home, with no way of contacting anyone for help and barely speaking the language.