Berlin, sniffle sniffle
So, the 25th was a public holiday. And since Thursday public holidays tend to mean that Friday’s lectures are cancelled, and since I don’t have any classes on Mondays anyway, that meant I got a super-duper long weekend. And since we’re getting towards the business-end of semester now, I thought I’d take the opportunity of a bit of a trip, before I could no longer afford to take the time away from study, and while I had a 5-day weekend.
The destination? Well, it was pretty obvious - there was one city which houses a rather large proportion of all the people I’d promised to visit, one city for which, I must admit, I have developed somewhat of an affection over my past few visits: Berlin. So, armed with my brand new (in fact, still “provisional - present this receipt with some photo ID”) BahnCard, I trundled down to the Bahn “service centre” at the station to put together some travel plans. Of course, these days that could all happen automatically over the Internet, but I wanted actual advice from a human, because I wanted to try something different - night trains! Yes sirree, the plan was to leave Saarbrücken Thursday evening (leaving Thursday free to do all the uni work I would otherwise have done on the weekend), and arrive in Berlin Friday morning, then leave Berlin Monday evening and return to Saarbrücken Tuesday morning, just in time for class. The nice service center person worked it all out for me, reserved seats on trains that required reservations, printed out the itinerary, and off I went.
Several days later (on the Thursday evening, to be precise), I discovered a few things about night trains. The first is that you don’t actually get all that much Ruhe in a Ruhesessel. (Meh. Next time I’ll go with a bed.) The second is that Berlin is not really far enough away to make a night train worthwhile - a day train would take around 6 or 7 hours, and although the night train travels somewhat more slowly and even spends some time just standing still (to help you sleep, i believe), what with changing trains and etc there were still only 6 or 7 hours during which I could have slept (ignoring the discomfort of the Unruhesessel).
Never mind, I’m young, the ol’ body’s been through worse, it’ll recover. (It did.)
Regarding catching up with people: I successfully made my way through the entire list. Stayed with J and U (such generous people!); had a fun dinner with J, U and K, and also a great night out with K and her somewhat-local friends (even if I piked on the dancing); saw the Da Vinci Code (Originalversion! such new-fangled amazement has yet to come to Saarbrücken), and later had brunch, with C and his various local and somewhat-local friends; and had coffee and a good yarn with T.
Regarding sightseeing: well, you know, there’s no end of things to do in Berlin. Highlights include: the Helmut Newton exhibition at the Museum for Photography (thanks I for the tip); finally making it inside the Reichstag building (the rain drove the crowds away); and lots of just random wandering. Photos here, here, and here.
The reason why I’m only blogging this more than a week later: I’ve had the sniffles the past week or so. Well, more than the sniffles - a decent, full-blown cold. This past weekend was spent almost entirely on trying to avoid any exertion, to try and recover as quickly as possible. I’m much better now, but not quite 100% yet. So that’s my excuse. Now, I should head back to the aforementioned business end of semester. Tschau!
