Grail Quest

I woke up at 10, and left Judson passed out in the room to go downstairs. Found Ricardo, and chilled for a bit with him and some Aussies.

Bumped into Lorenzo around 11, and we waited for Judson to wake up. So patiently.

At 12 I gave up waiting and woke him up. By 12:30 we were on the street looking for food. We settled on a pizza place on the corner. It was tasty, but nothing like the pizza back home. Sigh.

At 1 we went back to the hostel to discuss our plan for finding the Berlin wall. I recalled that the other day on the way to Sachsenhausen I saw what I thought was a chunk of the wall freestanding near one off the stations.. So we got on the U2 to the S8 to the S1 towards Oranienburg. We stared out the window the whole time... Only one wall section at the beginning seemed to fit my recollection and had potential, but it was too well made and study. I maintain that we has the location right, though, because the division between east and west were so obvious. On the east side of the tracks we saw nothing but slums and poorly built industrial complexes. The west side was much nicer, and had been for years. The division is so much more contrasted there than in the middle of the city where we are staying.

We didn't get back until around 4. We hadn't found the wall. So we resolved to go to the East Side Gallery near Checkpoint Charlie to see a preserved section of wall. Yet, of course, we never made it.

Instead we went with Claire to Kreuzburg, a lively neighborhood in Berlin Mitte.  Wandered for hours, taking in the hundreds of middle eastern (mostly Turkish) restaurants and stores, etc. really beautiful.

We ended up several U-Bahn stops from where we got out (from Kottbusser Tor to Rathaus Neukölln, and took the train back to the hostel. Then we siesta'd for a tad.

A little after 10:20 Judson, Claire, Lorenzo and I picked out an interesting place on the map at random for dinner and went.

We ended up at Oranienburger-Straße, and walked around the triangle formed by 3 streets: Tucholskystraße, Auguststraße, and Oranienburger Straße.

We started walking, stopping by each restaurant in turn, comparing menus and prices, until we settled on one we all liked. It was called Aиfstияz.

Recently, I've been complaining about how terrible (currywurst excepted) German food has been so far. But I had a southern German specialty dish at this place which blew me away. Käsespätzle is a pasta with fried onion and melted cheese, with salad and yoghurt dressing on the side. It was divine. Everyone else loved their dishes just as much. And it was only €39 for the 4 of us.

After dinner we got a drink down the street at a place called XTerrain, which is an underground bar that looked like a total dive. The four of us immediately loved it.

We got a few drinks, sitting down around 12:15, and just relaxed. The bar closed at 1:15, but it was a great little bit of time to spend chilling. 

We got back to the S-Bahn station and parted ways. Judson and Claire went to the club, Lorenzo and I returned to the hostel. Lorenzo has an early morning flight to Paris and I don't want to be too hungover tomorrow.

By 2:15 Lorenzo and I were back at the hostel, having gotten some late night currywurst at Alexanderplatz.

Lorenzo went to bed, and I said my goodbyes (he leaves around 4am). I stuck around for a bit to watch the Saints/Lions game, but I got tired and around 3 I headed to bed.

But I bumped into Judson, and then Claire. They hadn't been able to find the club they wanted to go to, so came home. We popped some good beers and had them above the bar until 4:15. I had a Budweiser (the Czech beer), which tasted like a better version of the AB InBev version.  Not surprising since they stole the recipe from the Czechs.

Tired.