Berliner? I hardly know her! Recap + Power Ranking

Berlin is the last city with Tom and Will before it’s a trio of Omahans. The original plan was for them to stick around until the 4^th when we parted ways, but since Tom is incredibly disorganized and immature he booked a flight a day early on accident. For their day we rented bikes, which caused me to immediately revert into a grade school state, making skid marks everywhere and standing tall on my pedals like a boss. It was a good way to see the Berlin Wall, Museum Island, some huge city park, and more. That was until it started raining and we all (Becca in particular) almost died during our Tour d’Berlin mad sprint because crossing streets here is incredibly similar to a level of Frogger but without the crocodiles trying to eat you (that might have happened too, can’t be too sure).  That, and I might have led us like salmon going upstream in traffic at one point. Details.

Tom couldn't have been more pumped. At the beginning.

We shared a solid last supper and cruised through a game of Kings in the lobby bar before the chosen ones departed in the morning for Amsterdam. Spent the second day walking around and reading the Topography of Terror, a 200 m stretch of the Berlin wall chronicling the rise and fall of the Nazi party. Pretty heavy stuff. We ate at a place with the waitresses dressed in sassy St. Paulli’s Girl costumes, and by that I mean traditional German garb that American girls have defaced over the years. Becca then had a sudden, irresistible urge to go shopping and I accompanied her because chivalry isn’t dead when I don’t want it to be. Even though Goose warned that all the stores were going to be closed (he was right), we told him we couldn’t stop going in all these amazing stores and came back with one souvenir after about an hour. Relaxed that night because we were just dead, and we followed our “longer sleep” by waking up too late anyways and missing our train to Frankfurt. Nice.

Onto the Euroromp Power Ranking:

Hostel – 8.5

The hostel was a nice clean spot with a very kind hostel management that spoke English. Based on Prague’s language barrier experience of a lifetime, everyone speaking English in Germany was a great thing for us naïve travelers. Everyone has agreed with me that everyone else in the world needs to “just learn to speak American.” This hostel had air conditioning as well which we’ve learned to wholeheartedly embrace, and the only real knocks were a) no real nightlife opportunities presented and b) two people in our room with severe throat conditions, one snorer and one cougher. The latter reason wasn’t necessarily the hostel’s fault, but it did put a damper on the hostel experience. The snorer put on an absolute clinic and had perfected the art of “The Snore Tease” - when the snorer presents you a brief recluse and a glimmer of hope with silence for about 5 seconds. You exhale, close your eyes again, prepare to snooze andddd OH MY GOD HE’S BACK. Snore teasers give you a calm before the storm and come back with a vengeance – louder than ever. The cougher was the Batman to the snorer’s Robin though. He was the true hero of the night, hacking away like he just emerged from deep within the catacombs of a West Virginia coal mine and coughing was his only hope of survival. He coughed for a good hour and a half strait until Becca cracked and shouted at him “JUST GO GET SOME WATER!” Nonetheless, the hostel had a good location next to the Berlin wall and, more importantly, a kebab shop, and was clean enough for a solid ranking.

Hippies!!!! But seriously, the Berlin wall was cool.

Food – 9

Food got a 9 because its food was the same style as Vienna’s and Prague’s but just a notch better, and not quite as good as Italy’s or Spain’s. Sorry Germany.

Sites – 7

We gave sites a 7 because during the last century Germany went through three of the most tragically awful mistakes/wars of all time, so I guess you could call these years “rebuilding years” if they were a college football program, except they are literally still rebuilding. It’s amazing that it’s in the condition it even is because the Berlin wall came down just over 20 years ago, but unfortunately the allies bombed the shit out of the city (sorry about that) and in the old, cool-looking German buildings’ spot they put Weiner Schnitzel stores, offices, and boring things. But some parts by the river remain pretty cool to walk around.

God we are SO crazy.

Best Site – 8.5 - Topography of Terror + Berlin Wall

As aforementioned, this is a 200 m stretch of the Berlin wall chronicling the rise and fall of some psychos named Hitler, Goebells and Himler that really didn’t like Jews. I mean, I don’t like how greedy they are either sometimes but I’m not about to go and do that. Becca and I concurred this would be like Obama’s campaign consisting of, “You want change??? We’re going to have to kill every Mexican in site then.” That would be followed by a majority of American inexplicably agreeing, and following suit. It’s insane and totally out of my grasp how this event even happened and still seems almost fake.

 The adjacent building details concentration camps, German influence in other countries, and houses copious amounts of unnecessarily graphic, sad, yet curious pictures of piles of dead bodies in their mass graves. I read every panel of the outdoor monument like a history geek should and that took a solid two hours. On the 3^rd of July, it was only appropriate. We ended the reading tour seeing a picture of a bunch of U.S. soldiers planting a U.S. flag on top of the Reichstag, which drew a huge fist pump from me like it was the glorious end to a fiction novel.

You're welcome, world

Nightlife – 6*

* = we were exhausted and it was a weekday
Weekdays hurt the ranking, and we just stayed around the hostel. It’s unfair to Berlin considering we’ve heard it’s one of the most fun cities in Europe, but unfair to the other cities we have ranked if we went off word of mouth instead of experience.

A disappointing 39 puts Berlin in 8th1) Rome - 46
1) Prague - 46
2) Madrid - 44
3) Barca - 43.5
4) Vienna - 41.5
4) Venice - 41.5
5) Nice - 41
6) Genoa - 39.5
7) Florence - 39.25

8) Berlin - 39
10) Marseille - 38
11) Narbonne - 36

- Andrew