the Swamp

Destination four: Berlin.

My expectations: A huge, old, dirty city containing some history and some cool architecture.

The Reality: An immaculate, historical, beautiful city containing the heartbeat of modern Germany with a feast of young people, museums, art and architecture.

My Summary: I love Berlin. Of the four cities I have experienced in Germany thus far, Berlin makes the top two. On the brink of leaving Sweden we learned that Brandy's cell phone was still at our host Helena's house! With no time to turn around to get it we entrusted Helena to send it via Swedish Express mail to our hostel in Berlin. We originally reserved our hostel for Monday and Tuesday night. We hoped to receive the package Wednesday at noon and hop on a train to Prague. So we waited... and waited... until Friday afternoon. The mailman came by that Friday... with NO package. We were going CRAZY at this point because the tracking number indicated that the package had already left Sweden and arrived in Germany on Wednesday. We had no clue what to do. Wait some more? Leave and hope the package would eventually return to Sweden and just have Helena send it to Florida? At the point of that LONG Friday afternoon when Brandy and I just about beat our heads against the wall and said "SCREW IT!" in came David, the hostel owner, with a small package. We knew at that point that the package was ours and that it had been at the hostel all along. In fact, it was sitting in one of the hostel's five letter boxes since Wednesday. We stayed all of those extra nights for (what we thought was) NOTHING! We didn't have time to emotionally react to all of the non-sense... we had a train to catch! So within an hour or so we booked a hostel for that night in Prague hopped on the next train.

Ironicies: (is that a word?) The word "berlin" means "swamp"... funny cause we were STUCK in Berlin for 2 extra days. Also, right when we got into Prague Brandy was browsing through the buttons on her new camera and somehow every last memory we captured in Berlin was erased! We do have ONE picture that was taken on our free tour in Berlin. You'll see Brandy and I squatting on the bottom left.
P.S. We seriously had the BEST tour of our lives. Our guide was Charly, an extremely animated and charismatic NYU history student hyped up on either speed or sugar-free Red Bull.