Willkommen to Berlin

Leaving Pisek was strange. It ended up being a quick departure after a lot of packing and a trip out of town after settling it all with my landlady and the school. I hope to go back there. I had a good time.

We headed to Prague and dropped off some of our stuff at Daniel's place, because he's awesome and we're eternally grateful for his help and friendship. We headed to the train station, got our tickets, and waited for the train.

While waiting for the train we met an American family who had heard of West Virginia, telling us how much they loved the white water rafting. They didn't seem to really get Prague, though. They were only there for twenty-four hours, only saw a few touristy spots, ate right in the middle of Wenceslas Square, and didn't really understand the castle. We didn't run into them again.

The train ride was about four hours long. Berlin has an amazing public transit system, much like the rest of Europe.

The first thing we did was go to the zoo. Berlin's zoo is the most species-diverse zoo in the world. It's right in the middle of the city, with some interesting architecture and statues around it.

We started out near the birds, which was fascinating in its own way but eventually we got tired of all of them. We then turned to see this statue:
Now, while the statue is already quite magnificent, we should say that when we first gazed upon it, there was a German little person on top of it. We then took this picture. It inspired us to photograph ourselves with as many statues as we could find.
We spent the whole day there, but I'll just give the highlights. The white wolves were situated right next to the bears, and they were both vying for attention from us.
Honestly, the wolf didn't stand a chance. That bear was amazing. He knew it, too.

There was a petting zoo, but they had some of the least friendly animals to pet. They had goats, which were fighting, lambs, which were skittish, and geese, which were just plain mean.

We also went into the cat house, where I got stared down by a few hungry lions. The tigers, leopards, and panthers were all pretty tired.
We also stopped in the aquarium which was there. We saw a starfish that looked exactly like Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants. We also found a shark to match Meredith's shirt.
We finished the day off by getting completely lost in Berlin. We had dinner at a mall. It was a wondrous day.

The following day, we figured out our Eurail passes to get cheaper railway fare for where we wanted to go. We spent the day sightseeing around Berlin.
We saw much of historic downtown Berlin. That's me at the Berlin Dome.

We walked all over the place, which wore Meredith and me out. We eventually made it to the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate before we had to head to the train station for our night train to Paris.

The train in itself was an adventure. Berlin and Paris are not close. We left at 8, and arrived at 9 AM. AND we had a full car, with four languages present. We were all about to communicate though. More on that later.