Berlin: Day One

I'm going to gloss over the fact that it's been more than a week since my Berlin trip and just post my thoughts on the city now, as if it were happening in real time (go ahead and ignore the fact that the Euro Cup just ended—I'll get back to that on a later date). In fact, there's a lot that I haven't talked about so far, so it's daily updates from here on in. Without further ado:

Riding on the Autobahn…

…is basically all I did today. For some reason my image of the Autobahn has always been this futuristic superhighway with plasma blue roads and lots of tunnels with flashing lights—basically something out of Minority Report. As it turns out, it's pretty much just a road, but you can go as fast as you want in certain parts, which is pretty cool except for the whole car-hitting-motorcycle-at-100-mph thing (happened today, not a pretty sight).

I can still see Tom Cruise jumping from car to car on this road, but it would have to be Mission Impossible Tom Cruise instead.

How did I get there? My mom's in town, which means I need to show her a place with a bit more history than Mannheim, which means taking a trip to Berlin. Of course, rather than splurge on the train ticket, I decided to go with the cheaper option.

Germany has something called Mitfahrgelegenheit, which translates roughly to "ride share" and is basically the equivalent of that section of Craigslist. Basically, you pay a stranger a few Euros to schlep you in their car to wherever it is they happen to be going. It's the cheaper alternative to public transportation, and it's potentially a good way to meet some interesting people. The worst experience I've heard of with Mitfahrgelegenheit is someone getting a ride with a Chinese immigrant who had just gotten his license and drove very slowly—and badly—from Mannheim to Frankfurt. So not too bad.

My ride to Berlin was filled with some interesting people: the driver was a stereotypically uptight German student who was extremely worried about his car—at one point he pulled off the highway to inspect the undercarriage when we hit a bump. I sat up front with him, and there were two girls in the backseat—a 26-year-old metalhead with two asymmetrical nose piercings, and a cute Polish girl who brought 30 shirts and six pairs of shoes for her week stay in Berlin. She was actually pretty inspiring though—she came to Germany with no knowledge of the language and took the same three-month German class that I'm enrolled in. One year later, and she's totally fluent, so there may still be hope for me.

In any case, the ride was pretty enjoyable for the first part—I basically slept and attempted to have conversations with people who didn't speak great English. But when we hit traffic on the road to Berlin, the driver panicked and decided to take a detour around Dresden, which is basically equivalent to hitting traffic on the way into L.A. and saying, "it's okay, I'll just cut around through Anaheim." We left at 1:45 in the afternoon for what was supposed to be a six- or seven-hour drive. We didn't get in to Berlin until 10:00, which wouldn't have been a problem, except for one thing.

Apparently happiness is a road hazard on the Autobahn.

Tonight was Germany v. Greece, Germany's first elimination-round game of the Euro Cup. Berlin has a huge public viewing right in the heart of town by the Brandenburger Tor, and I had hopes of going there and taking awesome pictures of Germans getting really into soccer. Sadly, the game started at 8:45, so I was confined to taking pictures of much lamer public viewings in restaurants during the last few minutes of the game. Kind of a bummer, but if Germany makes it to the final I'll make sure to come back here. And next time, I'll splurge for the train.

Somehow, this is the only photo I possess of a public viewing in Germany. I need to start taking more pictures.