Up North, Norther, Norther Still, & Turning 21 in Berlin

Hello!

I've decided to do subtitles for this entry, since it covers an entire week of adventures!!

A Few Days in Bremen...
Sunday we went to Philipp's church here in Bremen. The message was good -- about times in the desert that allow us to grow closer to God though we may feel farthest away. We ate with Philipp's mom who is a faaaaaabulous cook, way better than me! I honestly don't remember much of what we did the rest of the day... I just know we ended up watching the Princess Diaries in German. I didn't realize how many times I'd seen that movie-- I could recite quite a few quotes!

Monday we went for breakfast and then to a few outlet stores, one of which had better deals than I have EVER found in the USA. Seriously. And you guys know how cheap some of my stuff is. I'm now the proud owner of a $3 pair of khakis and a few t-shirts that cost $1 a piece. That is my all time record. Humbling, it was, as I have always bragged about how cheap stuff is back at home. My record at home for a pair of pants was $7! Until now, that is!! After that we went to the Universum, which is a neat science center place in Bremen. It was really cool! They had a special exhibit next door called the Schokoladium, or something like that, which showed how chocolate was made and there were even free samples of chocolate! We tried the liquid chocolate, which was served in a cake cone... yum! That night we made some frozen pizzas and watched "You've Got Mail", which I had theretofore never ever seen, and it was GREAT!


Hamburg
Tuesday we headed up to Hamburg. We stayed two nights with Philipp's really fun sister, Annette. We walked around town at night for a bit, although it was raining. We ended up having Eisschokolade at a bar, and then we went to the train station in search of food, which turned out to be gyros. Philipp and I always spend a while discussing what we want to eat and why, and he always refuses to make the decision, ha, ha! The Hamburg train station was really neat--although nothing in comparison to the new Berlin main station (see video on Facebook!).

Wednesday we headed back into town. We took a boat tour of the harbor. It was really cold and windy and rainy, so I didn't take but 2 pictures, since the windows on the boat were dotted with rain drops. We took a tour of the town hall which seemed more like a palace inside than a town hall! Then we went to St. Michaeliskirche and climbed the bell tower--really hard, lots of stairs!--where it was so windy they had closed off the highest part because it was too dangerous. I did get some nice shots of the city from way up there. The weather had cleared up, although it was still freezing and windy. We wandered back over to the downtown area, and into the Karstadt to buy some postcards (they're a lot cheaper than in souvenir shops!! 35 cents!) and we saw a sign on the door that EWAN MCGREGOR (Star Wars, Moulin Rouge, Big Fish) was going to be there promoting a new cologne...for another 15 minutes! So we went over to where he was supposedly gonna be, and there was no one at the desk, and it actually looked like they were still waiting on him. We assumed he'd gone home already, lol. Anyway, I think we went home after that because we were just super tired... later that night, we watched "The Holiday", which I thought was a great film!!!!!!

Laboe Beach/Kiel/The Logos Hope
We left Annette's apartment Thursday morning and headed up North... Schleswig-Holstein north...WAY north. We drove through Kiel and ended up at Laboe beach. We walked through a park and watched ducks fight (I could seriously watch ducks swim and play around all day and not get bored, lol) and then walked near the shore itself. It was very cold and windy!! I saw a real German U-boat and a bird's skull. I even took a rock from the water as a souvenir. We headed into Kiel after that, which is the capital of Schleswig-Holstein. Bought some 35 cent postcards at Karstadt and we wandered into the city. There was a Medieval times festival going on, where all the people selling things were dressed up. You could even buy wooden swords and shields. They even spoke differently, really playing the part!!! There were carnival rides and people selling candied almonds (I did not buy or consume any!). We ate curry wurst for lunch at this mall type place.

We spent the night on the Logos Hope (that is Philipp on the lower right in the "Ready to Make a Difference?" box lol... I wonder if he knows that...) which was a neat experience. The ship is one in a fleet of three ships for OM Ships that sail around all over the world delivering the Good News to people. Philipp spent two years on one of the ships, the Doulos. They have a book shop on board and people at the various ports of call come on board to browse, and there are teams that go out and reach out in the cities. Logos Hope is still under construction; they purchased it back in 2004. Apparently, it's come a long way since then.


Berlin
After spending the night on the ship, we went to the devotional at breakfast in the morning. Around 10 or so, Philipp and I were back on the road, bound for Berlin. We made good time. Picked up the key from Philipp's uncle, Rupert, a very nice and quirky older gentleman, who had many an interesting story to tell. When we arrived in the city, we kept seeing signs that said "Umweltplakette Pflicht" which roughly means "environment sticker required". See, Berlin now requires all drivers to purchase a sticker for about $8 that indicates how environmentally friendly your car is. If you don't have one and are caught, you get one point on your license and a $60 fine! So, that became our mission: find out where to get the sticker, get one, and put it on the car before getting caught in the city without one. They were on the hunt, too. We saw many police officers walking around and checking the cars. We finally got the sticker and went back to put it on Philipp's car windshield...thankfully, we had no fine for not having one. We didn't park right in the city, so that was probably why :-).

We wandered over to the Potsdamer Platz, where there are all kinds of bars, restaurants, a casino, and two large cinemas. We bought tickets to see the new Clooney film, "Michael Clayton". Then we went to a bar which had a happy hour, had a few drinks (two days before my 21st birthday!!! Hey Mom, this bar had like 12 different types of margaritas! I had a watermelon one.) The movie was AWESOME. I recommend it to any of ya'll.

The next day we went to breakfast with Rupert where the breakfast itself, the way it was served, looked like a million bux! Mine came with eggs, bacon, bagels, bread, butter, and a steak! I gave most of my steak to Philipp, though...not a big steak eater. He dropped the two of us off at the Reichstag, the seat of the German government, and we waited in line to get in. It's a pretty popular place. There was a guy there riding around on a bike trying to sell pretzels, which were heated by fire in his basket attached to the front of his bike. He also advertised some in English: "German bread!", he shouted. Ha, ha... inside the Reichstag it was neat. Apparently that dome way up top is not enclosed, so it was cold in there, too!

We wandered to the Brandenburg Gate after the Reichstag, which is just so majestic and cool. Right next to that is the Hotel Adlon, where Michael Jackson dangled his baby from the balcony of his room back in 2002. In a nearby gift shop, I bought a t-shirt as a birthday present to myself :-) We walked through this French-themed mall, which had nothing but French stuff (I bought crepes...) and it smelled real bad around the cheese counter. They sell cheese there that has GREEN MOLD on it! Apparently, the more mold, the better the cheese tastes. Nasty.

Anyway it was so windy that day (there was even a tornado warning and it was recommended not to leave the house!) we decided to go to the Pergamon Museum. The building from the outside was neat; you can still see thousands upon thousands of bullet holes in the walls from the war! It was really neat inside, too--a ton of Roman age artifacts. We had to wait in line for a while there, since everyone had the same idea as we did regarding the weather. No one wanted to be outside. But be outside we had to, as the museum was overfilled! So we had to wait a bit. There's a lot of stuff in there. Stuff you can't even believe existed! It's like looking at dinosaur skeletons.

We went home kinda early that night because of the weather, we thought we'd watch a movie at Philipp's uncle's house. We never got to it, though. We ended up talking with Rupert for almost 3 hours about various things. Actually, he did most of the talking, and we occasionally chimed in, but his stories are very interesting!! So we never watched the movie... we went upstairs where we were staying shortly before midnight, and Philipp came in at exactly 12 to be the first to wish me a happy birthday... we chatted for about an hour and then went to sleep.


Birthday!
Sunday morning I got a bundle of tulips from Philipp and his uncle! We then went to Potsdam (sorry Mom, no postcard from here... I have failed!) and visited the guest palace to the Sanssoucci, called simply the "New Palace". It was a really neat room. I hate it that we aren't allowed to take pics inside, there was a lot of stuff worthy of a photo... one room's walls and ceilings were made entirely from seashells!! The weather was very bad that morning but eventually cleared up for about half an hour, only to return to its previous state of crappiness... we had lunch at a cozy little Italian place around the corner from Rupert's house, then headed home to crash for a few hours. Philipp had the most enormous calzone I have ever seen (those who have been to Broadway pizza by campus know how big those suckers are)!

After our naps, we headed back out on the town to meet a friend, Marius. We ate at this fantaaaaaaastic Indian place. The first time I ever had Indian food was in Amsterdam, and then Philipp said we'd go in Berlin to his "favorite" place. And it was soooo good. The sinks in the bathroom were even amazing. They even had a PERMANENT happy hour! So I had some Indian chicken dish (forgot the name), that you can see on my Facebook video :-)... and a few cocktails. We went and saw another movie afterward with Tom Hanks called "Charlie Wilson's War", which I didn't find all that good cuz I'm not into politics, and the entire film was nothing but constant, high-speed dialog. Soooo I got a little lost, lol...

We missed the last train home so we had to take the bus. After riding the bus for an hour, we got off about 2 miles from home... Philipp had asked the driver to tell us where to get off, but we were sitting up top (double decker bus) and he never told us, probably because he thought the bus was empty... we shouldn't have A. sat up top, and B. depended on the bus driver for ANYTHING. So, we walked home at 3:00 in the morning, after trying to call a taxi and being told there were none available... we reached the square around Rupert's house where there were 3 taxis just sitting there. Ugh. Well, at least I got to walk off some of that dinner!! We finally got home and were asleep by 4am...


Sonstiges ("Miscellaneous")
We headed back to Bremen yesterday morning. Philipp had to be in court for some kind of violation at 3:30. I hung out at his house uploading all my pics and stuff...overall it was a nice evening. Despite how tired I was, I got a lot of stuff done. Viktor is coming to visit in the summer, as are my two 13-year-old cousins from Germany, so I got to do some planning on that. We're headed down to Key West for a few days and then probably taking the kids up to St. Augustine for the day before going on vacation w/ the parents (shout out to Momma!) I also bought my plane ticket HOME! I will be home Wednesday, July 23... I have one week to meet with an advisor at UCF, officially apply by application at Siemens, and unpack, before going up to New York City to meet Viktor for a few days. I want to see EVERYTHING there is to see in New York!

I am really excited about my upcoming trips: in one week, I will already be in Paris!! I am even excited about going back to UCF in the fall (my readmission went through without a hitch--I don't even have to fill out a FAFSA this year!).

This week I am getting caught up on stuff here in Ko-town, exercising, and meeting Vendy to discuss Paris plans... it should be a blast :-)


Love,
Caitlin