Berlin

I took a train to Berlin last Thursday through Saturday. I went with two of my roommates, and our main reason for going was to see the Berlin Philharmonic. On Friday, we went on a free walking tour of Berlin, and it was great because our guide was really funny and it was a nice long tour and free! I tipped him of course, because he deserved SOME kind of pay. In the tour we saw pretty much all the big sights in Berlin: the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Holocaust memorial, parts of the Berlin wall, Checkpoint Charlie, Humbolt University, the site of the book burnings during the 1930s, and we also stood on the spot where Hitler's bunker is still burried 6 meters below ground. You know, the place where he committed suicide after WWII. It was great.

That evening we went to our concert at Philharmonic hall, and it was spectacular. I have never heard such a perfect performance. I wish I was more familiar with the pieces that they played (an English Violin concerto and a 5 movement piece by Bartok) but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The bass trombone player had a little solo in the Bartok piece; it was a big, weird sounding gliss and it was very comical, and the other trombones immitated it. It was just funny to hear. What made the evening interesting was that we had been having dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, and we were late in getting back to our hostel to change, and so once we had our nice clothes on, we had to RUN to the performance hall, nice dress shoes and all. It was crazy, and we were all out of breath and sweaty once we took our seats. Not so fun, but once we calmed down, we were able to enjoy the music. 

So the next day, Saturday, was our travel day and I am glad that we decided to see Berlin on Friday because Friday was the beautiful, clear, sunny day but Saturday was very cloudy, gloomy, and cold! We were so glad to leave that behind us as we got on our first train (the first of 5 trains to get back). We had this cheap group ticket that got us back to Heidelberg for only 11 euros each, but the catch was that we had to take several different trains and we had to exchange trains 4 times and sometimes in the middle of nowhere. That was kind of weird because a couple times we had to wait about 20 minutes in a completely deserted train station, save the few people who were waiting with us. We were nervous about our train not showing up or us missing it or something because we had no idea how we would get back if that happened. Luckily our trains were all there on time and we had no mishaps, just 10 hours of sitting on trains...