Berlin, Germany...Day 1

I arrived in Germany at what seemed like a million o'clock in the morning, but I think it was around 8 am? I got to my hotel jet lagged as hell, and after a bit of unpacking, took a nap until about 12 noon. Once I woke back up I was still tired but I decided to try to stay awake for the rest of the day to get back on to a regular schedule. The first order of business was finding out how I was going to get to the Olympic Stadium. I knew there was a train station near my hotel, I just had to find it. (If you want to see a bigger version of any of these pictures, just click on it). These are pictures of what I'm assuming is a WWI memorial (it had a list of names from the years 1914-1918 around the wall) right near my train station, so I passed it a few times every day. Can anyone translate that german text?

Getting to the stadium wasn't to complicated, just one stop on two trains. German public transport is completely on the honor system, I found out. You buy a ticket from a machine then validate it at another...but there's no gate, and no ticket checker. If you wanted to you could just not pay and get on the train. However, ticket checkers do ride on the trains/busses from time to time, and the one time I saw one he wasn't wearing a uniform or anything like that. Just a guy in civilian clothes who, in the middle of the ride, got up, showed everyone an official ID, and demanded to see everyone's tickets. Its a 40 euro fine if you ride without a ticket, and they apparently never accept the "I'm just a dumb tourist" excuse.

So, I got to the Olympiastadion.

This was outside the Olympic Stadium, two days until the championships. Those banners (the middle picture) were everywhere in the city, and to the right is a picture of the street sign for Jesse Owens Allee, the road right in front of the stadium. After wandering around a bit and having my first bratwurst (awesome) and first German beer, Schultheiss (also awesome) I found the bell tower, a massive tower near the Olympiastadion. There was a small museum in there, and an elevator to the top, which of course, I took...

These are: a picture of the bell tower, a view of the Olympic Stadium from the bell tower, the warm up track, the thrower's practice area, and some views of Berlin and around...the bell tower and Olympiastadion are on the western outskirts of Berlin. The last picture is of course the bell in the bell tower. You can see the Olympic rings on it. This, however, is a replica of the original bell from the 1936 Olympics. I'm not exactly sure of the story but somehow the original bell was damaged, then buried sometime in the 50's for some reason. Eventually they dug it up and it now sits right outside of the Olympiastadion...there's a picture of it later.

I took a different route back to my hotel and stopped off in what seemed like an old section of Berlin with lots of old architecture, a big church, and cobblestone roads, not all of which cars could drive on. There were also some banks and a Burger King as well! Here's a picture -

I eventually found a pizza place where I got two square slices of pizza, that they cut up into even smaller squares and you ate with a fork. This also came with a glass of beer, of course...this time I went with Hefeweissen. I poured what I thought was some salt on to the pizza, which in fact turned out to be sugar. They had no pepper, garlic, oregano, or anything like that to put on your pizza, just sugar. It actually was pretty good.

After that I just took a train back to the road my hotel was on, got a drink at a bar on the way back, got another drink at the hotel bar, then off to bed.