So we landed in Berlin. Not much to see, small airport, whatever. First impression: friendly people! A woman just kinda involved herself in our dumb English jokes as we waited for our luggage, all smiles and heavily-accented English. We (meaning mostly just my friend Jon) chatted with her a bit, moved on. Encounter number two: imagine to yourselves four offensively foreign foreigners trying to figure out the German ticket machine (pro-tip: selecting the English option just translates the welcome screen and nothing actually helpful, or so it felt), when suddenly an old embittered German man rambles up and just takes Euros from one of us and starts pressing buttons. We immediately engaged in some awkward hemming and hawing, threw some noncommittal German syllables in there ("uhrr"), and eventually managed to convey our respective destinations to this couldn't-be-more-German old man. This little anecdote is necessary, as it foreshadows the rest of my day quite well.
Uhh, we passed buildings. They looked nice. When I start taking pictures on tours, y'all will be more easily able to glean whatever you want about the appearance of the city from them. I'm not very keen on such things. For what it's worth, it's got the bussle of New York with a nice splash of quaint European-isms. So far, I like it. And I haven't really seen anything that Berlin actually tries to show off yet.
So people have claimed Berlin is logical and simple to navigate. Not true right from the beginning. Yea, now I get it, and most of my mistakes were rookie suburban white boy mistakes, not really the fault of Berlin. But damn. I had a stressful couple of hours. My friend Kfriend and I ended up at Hauptbahnhof (literally Main Station) and crashed with our luggage in a couple of chairs in a food court-y place. Kfriend bust out a plethora of maps and guidebooks, I sat in a chair, stared at things and said unhelpful things like "we need to find a bus". I figured out that I needed to take bus M85 (because it said so in English in the email I had gotten from Middlebury people...I put that one together well), and I walked outside and there it was. Now, this email said "Get off at Appenzellerstraße after 50 minutes". Okay.
I'm now convinced that Berlin busdrivers (Busfahrer) are universally stone-faced middle-aged men with a propensity for brevity, mumbling and scaring the hell out of foreigners. I say "Appenzellerstraße", he says "Ich kenne sie nicht" ("I don't know it") and mumbles some other things. I get confused, he promptly gives up on me, as well as making me pay, tells me there's a sign I should check. I find no such sign, I think I'm totally crazy, he eventually gets up real quick to show me where it is, then says "Schild nicht da, tut mir leid" ("Sign not there, sorry") and runs back. So now I'm on this bus, clueless whether I'm going the right way or not, haven't paid for a ticket, lugging two huge suitcases around, and sweating my balls off from nerves.
Let's cut the story short. I spent the next two hours getting all sorts of broken-English and scary-German advice about where I needed to go. I got on and off bus M85 three separate times in confusion, paying only once because I asked the busdriver, uhhh, don't I need to pay? And he said "Mmm ach so!" ("Mmm, oh yea!") and I paid. Apparently busdrivers are much more concerned with staying on time (and they are ON TIME) than making sure everyone there has paid. Most people have IDs or passes that they show so the busdriver kinda just apathetically flaps his hand to wave everyone through while looking German. That confused me more. And they were all terse, stone-faced middle-aged men. Could've been the same Helmut for all I know. In the end, I figured Berlin's public transportation out, doing much to damage the already terrible notion Europe has of Americans in the process. Sweated through one shirt. Got tons of pity smiles from German mothers. So it goes.
So. Now I'm settled in. My room is nice, other than the moment where every shelf in my closet promptly fell off their mounts and crashed to the floor, scattering all my nicely placed clothes. I could almost hear the damn laugh track, and had to cover it by saying "OH THAT'S JUST RIDICULOUS" to no one in particular. I've been to three stores; all the names sound like burly German men. Ladl (think small Walmart), Konrad (think Best Buy), and Roller (think IKEA). I was warned that Germans expect you to bag your own groceries SCHNELL SCHNELL SCHNELL, and it's mostly true. The silence permeating the store while I frantically bagged my stuff was, frankly, shriveling. Sweat through shirt number two! Here's a tidbit: you have to buy your own grocery bags in Germany, and most people bring their bags with them. Also, carts are all locked together, and you have to put in a Euro coin to unlock it, which you then remove and re-lock the cart when you're done. Yea...definitely creeped on an old German man for that information.
Tomorrow is a big day. Gotta do a bunch of official stuff and travel all over the place, so it should be interesting. I'm sure I'll have plenty of funny stories involving my extreme humiliation tomorrow, so tune in next time!
I'm bad at, uh, writing things that most people want to know. So let me know by email if there's something you wanna know. Cause I'll probably just write about weird things. So it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment