A wet morning in March. Drizzling politely, not pouring. Skies overcast and temperature low. Fairly British I'd say. Cars rolled into the Quad at Tonbridge School and one by one the trippers stepped out into the rain, unflinchingly splashing through puddles onto the coach. An hour and a bit later, we were at Heathrow. Sitting in Costa Coffee. A habit which would become second nature to some of us over the course of the coming Sunday-through-Sunday school trip to Germany's capital Berlin.
First thing I'd advise you to do when going to Berlin is to check the weather. During the course of the trip, it snowed twice (on one occasion settling to about 3 cm deep), rained with intensity ranging from drizzle to downpour and the temperature outside was below freezing on a number of occasions. Tip: take a coat. And a thermal vest. Thermal vests are good.
Another thing I reckon I ought to mention: it's illegal to do a Hitler salute in Germany. Like, at all. Which is perfectly understandable, and I haven't got a problem with the law itself. But practically, it's quite inconvenient. I mean, how often do you want to raise your arm to eye level or above every day? Maybe if you're pointing to something, or raising your hand in accordance to something. And high-fives: we're pretty frequent high-fivers and so as not to look like we were paying tribute to Hitler every time we did something awesome, we had to resort to low-fives, an alteration of the classic celebration that almost drew blood when someone held out their hand for one over a plate with a fork on it. Fortunately, no one got arrested, but I can think of several near misses for myself, just pointing to something.
For four of the days we were out there, we had lessons at the
BWS Germanlingua Centre, an excellent language school in the centre of Berlin. Lessons were interesting and the amount I learnt was incredible. I'm fairly on top of the grammar I have to know at this stage already, so I didn't learn much on that front. But it was the fluency and vocab that I achieved after four days speaking it constantly with an actual German person, rather than "speaking" it for 30 minutes every other day in a classroom. Plus, when lessons finished for the day, you were still surrounded 24/7 by the language, whether you were ordering food, going round museums, or just eavesdropping on random people you see in the street. Oh, and they sort out German host-families for you to stay with. Result:
Deutsch-flavoured
gut-ness.
On the subject of flavour, the trip made me realize (through no fault of its location or program, but simply by the nature in which I had lots of freedom and lots of free time) how much I bloody love fast food. Now when I say fast food, I'm including the healthier joints like Subway (hmmmm, meatball sub), the niches like Häagen-Dazs (hmmmm, cookies and cream), the coffee houses like Starbucks (it costs
WHAT!?!?) and the poisonous yet heavenly grounds of places like McDonalds (that's right, you heard me,
twenty chicken McNuggets please). Basically, we spent a great amount of time in these places. Don't get me wrong, the dinners our host families provided were superb (with the exception of a disgusting piece of cake I paid my partner € 5.47 to eat for me)! But, even though we were fairly good at the language and keen to learn, the conversation round the dinner table was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I swear to God they were using long words on purpose just to show us up... What was worse is that there were two other students staying with the same family, both of whom were considerably more fluent than us. Consequently, we only ate dinner at home twice. All other meals (other than breakfast and a couple of lunches at the bakery near the language school) were at one of the aforementioned gourmet halls. To be honest, if I wanted to have an itinerary to remember the trip by, I could simply get a blood test and then track what we did each day by the number of physical symptoms acquired.
One of many things that Germany does incredibly well is the transport system. You know how in England, catching a train requires detailed study of the few-and-far-between maps, an in-depth understanding of the ticket system, a great sense of timing, an enormous amount of patience, and lastly a lot of money? (Yes I know I'm exaggerating). Well in Germany, the trains (that includes the
S-Bahn(train),
U-Bahn(tube/underground),
Straßenbahn(tram)) are frequent, on time, cheap, easy to understand, and clean. What's more, I'd say the lines themselves enable you to get from anywhere to anywhere else in Berlin with only two trains, three maximum. And they actually work! In England you have to find the train station (in Berlin, wherever you look you'll probably see the big "S" or "U" signifying a station), buy a ticket if you don't have a travel card (in Berlin you can get passes for 7 days, for a month, for a year) and find and get on the train after sticking your card through a stupid machine (in Berlin you can waltz into the station and be on the train in 30 seconds - provided you carry your ticket with you in case you're checked, you can go wherever you want, as many times as you want). In fact we loved the transport system and being able to use it easily so much that sometimes, if we had free time, we went train-hopping. Completely pointless. You get on a random train for a couple of stops, get out when you feel like it and get on the train immediately across the platform without even looking at where it's headed. Great fun. Once we did this for about 80 minutes (although this was the day I realized how much I'd missed listening to music, and so had found my iPod and spent the day being very anti-social), then when we decided to get back to where we needed to be for the evening's activity, we were back where we started within 10 minutes. Cool, huh? Oh, and the drivers of the double-decker trains (that's right, double-decker trains exist for long-distance journeys) have a secondary job description: DJs. Every time they made an announcement over the intercom, a little two-part polyphonic tune played. Sounds silly, but it gave us all considerable amusement during the journey.
Having got back to the house at whatever hour after a busy day's German-learning and sight-seeing, most of what remained of the evening, the oncoming night and often several hours of the early morning were spent chatting or playing with one of the countless packs of souvenir playing cards I like to buy (so much more practical than postcards). This meant firstly that myself and my partner got to know each other considerably better, and secondly that we both obtained serious skill in the game of Rummy. Neither of which is a bad thing. Both being incredible wits, we were usually rolling in laughter over something amusing that had happened that day, and that we had then expanded like the comedy genii that we are. So much so that my partner, who usually shuffled, kept losing, though I insisted he had a subconscious masochistic streak which was
forcing him to fix the cards while shuffling and thus deal himself a bad hand.
The week's activities other than lessons ranged from playing football on an astro used by many German politicians after a long day politic-ing, right through visiting churches, going to the opera and touring museums to bowling. The choice of museums in Berlin is fantastic, being such a historical place an' all. We visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum (all about the Berlin wall and various attempts to get over/under it), the
Reichstag (not actually a museum - they built the German parliament with a glass roof so you can go above it and look down into the going ons of politics), the Pergamon Museum (the German equivalent of the British Museum - basically stuff from ancient civilizations they've nicked in the past) and the Jewish Museum (fantastic architecture and an amusing gift shop - more on that later). To be honestly, museums aren't my favourite thing in the world. But I found a lot of the ones we visited (especially the Jewish museum) really fascinating, and there are enough museums in Berlin to keep any tourist happy for several blue moons. Heck, there's even an island named "Museum Island"!
Now, I mentioned the amusing gift shop in the Jewish Museum. Amusing in that it stocked a
Moses action figure. Not just a Moses Action Figure though - a Moses Action Figure with
detachable Staff and 10 Commandments. And on the back it had all sorts of fun facts. For example, his age, job and achievements were given with extensive detail, and it even had the 10 Commandments and the Plagues. My partner bought one (he assures me as a collectible) and we got some great material from it: 1) The First Born Son in every family dies - "
YES, I get my brother's room!" and 2) 3 days of Darkness - "Couldn't you just turn the CD Player off?"
So in conclusion, Berlin rocks. I'd definitely go back there - one week was nowhere near enough to see everything in the city. But even if you're not a massive sight-seeing maniac, Berlin is a great city just to be in, just to walk around completely freely and enjoy. It's beautiful, it's filled with great places to be, shops to shop in and establishments to eat in, and I'm told that it has a fantastic night life.
That's all for now. Over an' out.
