Berlin - Day 2

Today we woke up after our first night in the hostel.  To our surprise, it was not as bad as we thought.  In fact, the beds were really comfortable! Waking up at 7 was still pretty hard even though that is sleeping in for most of us during the school week.  We were down in the main lobby for breakfast at 8, then out the door at 9 to go on our bike tour of Munich.  Upon arriving at the bike tour place we met our guide, Sam from New Zealand and our new best friends…the bikes.  Each bike had a different name labeled on each of the bikes just for kicks and giggles! Our tour started off in Alexanderplatz where we reviewed the TV tower meaning, the world clock, and the buildings surrounding.  We saw numerous buildings that starred as backgrounds in movies including a Soviet club building that had a replica of Sputnik on the top. We went on our way throughout berlin until we got to the murals on the wall.  We walked by all the murals along the wall admiring the artwork that was displayed.  At this point the heat was starting to turn on! Pretty sure this is when the sun burning began; unfortunately none of us thought that maybe sunscreen would be a good idea.  Afterwards we went to see and original watch tower that was in the “no mans’ land”.  Afterwards we went to lunch at a Turkish restaurant.  We made a bet with Connor to eat all the hot sauce off of Willow’s plate for 5 €.  Needless to say Connor did not make the 5 Euros but came rather close to his early death.  Then we went along the Berlin wall hitting all the cool tourist attractions including the location of Hitler’s bunkers.  Obviously it was closed off but it was an interesting sight to see.  Our journey with the tour guide ended at Brandenburg gate but fortunately we had an entire journey ahead of us with the mobster!

After a quick stop at Starbucks we began our journey going through the Zoo gardens!

One could clearly tell a few of us were starting to get tired due to our lack of ability to control our bikes.  Luckily we had a goal in mind…well at least we did…TO GET TO THE ZOO! We made some pit stops along the way including the Victory Statue. Unfortunately on our way to our numerous stops we managed to anger pretty everyone who managed to come even close to our path.  Finally we reached the zoo or at least the Mobini’s thrifty speed tour of the Berlin Zoo…from behind.  We saw some birds, llamas, and even hyenas.  We tried so hard to make the hyenas laugh but to our dismay they only looked at us like we were weird.  After the zoo, we continued to ride around throughout parks, which was very peaceful. However, after the parks, we needed to get across the city back to Alexanderplatz. It was stressful especially because it was rush hour and we were getting yelled at and honked at by the German people. We saw the memorial for the Jewish community especially for the children that were killed and learned about the tradition of leaving a rock at the memorial. We also visited the Jewish Synagogue which was still to this day guarded by police. It concluded a very tiring tour around Berlin.

We went to return our bikes and walk to dinner. Mr. Mobini took us to an Italian restaurant and he ordered pizzas for us all in Italian, making us follow traditional Italian customs while in Germany… As dinner was wrapping up, we had a couple more guests meet us up: two bees. We all tried so hard to stay calm as to not aggravate it. Thankfully, we left shortly after and no one was harmed, not even the bees. Overall it was a great day and we were laughing the whole way home, literally.

-Katie and Renee