Beers and Brats (Berlin Pt. 1)

Sunday morning we took an early morning train out of Prague bound for Berlin. The countryside was phenomenal and from outside of Prague through Dresden we followed the Elbe and watched kayakers and fishing boats go by. When we got into Berlin, we took the S-bahn from the Hauptbanhof train station to Alexanderplatz in East Berlin and then the U-bahn up to Rosa-Luxembourg Platz where our hostel was. Our hostel was an awesome place with a restaurant and bar built into it downstairs; and although we were in the 10-bed room the four of us only had one other roommate. We knew were planning on doing a city tour the following day, so we decided to look up the sites we would see tomorrow and then do something on our own that wouldn’t be covered on the tour. Since the majority of famous sites were right along the East/West Berlin border, we decided to go far into West Berlin and just explore the area known as Charlottsburg.

We S-bahned down to the Berlin zoo at the far West end of the Tiergarten, the massive garden that occupies the entirety of Central Berlin, and then walked up through Charlottsburg to Charlottsburgschloss, a baroque castle palace built for the Prussian royalty back in the day. We found it interesting that in the parks leading up to the palace, just about everybody was engaged in games of bocce ball. As we passed one such game, I heard a woman say “Das ist gut, ja!” which is probably the most German thing anyone can possibly say, so that made me really happy. We didn’t feel like paying to go inside the palace, so we just lounged on the grass in the garden outside and took a little power nap. Afterwards we strolled back south through Charlottsburg to Kurfurensdamm, Berlin’s version of the glitzy Champs-Elysees in Paris. Since I was with three girls, making progress down Kurfurensdamm past Louis Vuitton and other boutiques was slow. I was admittedly glad when everyone’s feet starting hurting. We went clear across Berlin via U-bahn and came out in the far North of East Berlin. For dinner, we had an absolute feast at the Prater Biergarten there. I had at least two full meals of bratwurst, Polish sausage, pork loin, corn on the cob, potato salads, and above all, some amazing hefeweissen beers. Everyone was pretty exhausted from our post-pub crawl, early-morning traveling, so we basically went back to the hostel and passed out from a food coma.