10/5

We're in our little rental car again, heading from Berlin to Prague.  In Berlin we stayed in a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg, formerly on the east side of the wall - an area of old, worn graffitti-covered buildings now known for its a young, trendy hipster population.

On our first night in Berlin, Sunday, we GPSed our way to the cheap little apartment a little late, at about 7pm, where the manager ran us through the basics of the place in a rush to get home.  Afterward we walked toward the more populated neighborhood areas, passing through a park on our way.  The park was pratically filled with twentysomethings drinking smoking and dancing.  Around one busy drum circle we asked a local what the crowd was about.  On Sundays, beside that park there is a large flea market and the park usually becomes a bit crowded, but it turns out that the following day was a public holiday recognizing the east/west reunification - everyone would be off work on Monday, and this was a park very near where the wall stood, so we'd arrived at an unusual time.

The local was an illustrator who joined us for drinks at a beer garten a few blocks away, swapped stories and gave us a good feel for the area (with- like we've been experiencing our whole trip- her almost prefect English) and closed the place down with us.

The next day we set out to explore Berlin and some of the sites in our guidebooks, but we quickly figured out that almost everything except restaurants was closed for the holiday - even the park was nearly empty so the whole day was pretty slow-going, and we had already decided to stay an extra (third) night in Berlin.  We did wander to a few night sites - we'd read about Dr. Pong, which our book described as a former ping pong auditorium-turned bar.  It turns out that "auditorium" ended up being more like "room barely big enough to hold a game of ping-pong" so we skipped out.  We found ourselves by the same beer garten and met some students there while figuring out what to do next - they suggested a Cafe/Bar a few stops down the tram line literally called Cafe Bar, where we had our last drinks of the night.

All through our trip, we'd been hearing that when in Berlin, you have to visit the museums, so on our third day, Tuesday, we decided to pick up a little culture and headed to the museum isalnd of five closely placed museums on the other side of the city.  We optimistically bought tickets that covered visiting all five museums, but after it took us 3-4 hours to finish the Neues museum alone, the other museums, uh... missed the honor of our presence.  We also re-re-re-learned that day not to order German food.

There was an advertised Berlin pub crawl for tourists like us at 8, which took a group of about 20-25 of us to five night spots- actually, each place was mainly empty before we arrived, but it was definitely some of the best time we had in Berlin meeting and hanging out with the travellers along for the ride with us.