Berlin
From Amsterdam came an eleven hour bus ride down to Berlin, which put all our terrible ferry experiences to
shame, easily claiming the highly-contested title of “worst travel experience of the trip”. Apart from being stuck on a
bus for so long, the bus itself had absolutely no leg room, so I spent almost the entire time with my knees digging
into my chin.
After finally arriving in Berlin and spending hours trying to remember how our legs work, we dropped our stuff off at
our hostel, where we met up with a fourth member of our small group, Marty, also a friend from Sydney and we set
off exploring Berlin. Being in Berlin was a huge thing for me, having learnt so much about it not only in history classes
but also through studying German. It was amazing being able to walk around and recognise places, and kind of
understand what all the signs meant everywhere. We were lucky enough to find out that three of our friends from
Contiki were staying in Berlin at the same time as us, so most of what we did over the next few days involved all
seven of us.
Our daily expeditions in Berlin ranged from the standard Berlin Wall visit, going to the Holocaust Museum, a highly
sombre experience, Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburg Tor/Gate, the Reichstag and the Pergamon museum. Every one
of these attractions was really cool to see, but the thing I loved most about the city was the general vibe of it. I don’t
really know how to describe the city other than kind of young, with the majority of people we saw who weren’t
tourists being in their twenties, and there was a prevalent sense of an embracing of anything different, with no
hairstyle or dress sense being out of place.
Munich
We had originally planned to go from Berlin to Hamburg to watch a concert, but some unforseen factors (read Chris
losing our tickets), meant that we had to cancel that leg of the trip and instead caught a train to Munich a few days
early. We were more than happy to do as it not only meant we got a completely unnecessary head start on
Oktoberfest, but more importantly that we got to meet up with a group of about fifteen people from our Contiki,
who we otherwise would not have been able to see.
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