Berlin, Germany

In the train, we got another room that sits 6 to ourselves. Since we had two luggages, we found it fair. At any rate, no one said otherwise, so why not? While travelling to Berlin, I just wrote the blog about the last day in Hamburg, and then put on some nice, soft surf music by Jack Johnson. Sheilla fell to sleep to the tunes while I enjoyed the sceneries of passed by pastures and little German villages and towns.



We arrived at the Berlin Central station. This station, so far, was the modern-looking one, with 4 stories that had stores as if the place doubled as a shopping mall as well. But shopping wasn’t what we’re here for at the moment. So we managed to get ourselves out and took the taxi to our hotel.

Once checked in, we went to our room, and Sheilla contacted her friend Lisa. They met some years ago in Bandung through a friend. Lisa was visiting from Germany. Quickly, they became good friends. Sheilla showed her around Bandung and was being a good host. Since then, they’ve been good friends, often communicating via Facebook. Now, Lisa would like to show us her hometown. She had even made plans on what to see from her little travel guide flashcards. Since Lisa was full of energy, as if she was naturally high, we felt really energetic too and couldn’t wait to start sightseeing. But since at the moment, it was night time, and it was a little cold and dark to be walking too far and too much. We were going to try anyway.

We started off walking to the Alexanderplatz tower, officially dubbed by Lisa as “Alex”. Alex had a rotating restaurant at the very top that allowed anyone to have a 360º view of Berlin, when it was clear of course. We didn’t go up there, but went around the base area. We also went to a large open area where we found a time statue that can actually tell time around the world. Sheilla found Jakarta, and I found all three time zones in the US. We made a note to come back here during the day to take pictures.

Alexanderplatz, to me, reminds me of LA, in a way that the streets were wide and straight, and there were lots of open spaces. So Lisa decided to take us where streets were much smaller and winding, much more typical to how European streets would be. On a side note, Alexanderplatz and the hotel we were staying in were in East Berlin.





We came across an area where Lisa said has many “backyards”. A backyard, as best as I can explain it, is an area in the center of one or more buildings and has no ceiling. Imagine a tic-tac-toe with the center square as the “backyard”, while the other squares represent some buildings. In each backyard, you may have different things. We went through several and found restaurants, cafés, gardens, and yards.











We walked through more backyards and streets before Sheilla and I said that we were going hungry and would like a dinner. Eventually we got to this Asian Fusion restaurant where a menu item, Pho, caught my eye. Lisa recommended this restaurant anyway, so we went in. I ordered the Pho, and Sheilla ordered a Wonton noodle soup. The food was actually delicious. The Pho wasn’t as good as the one I’ve eaten in Arlington, VA near Washington D.C. in the US. But I was hungry, and it wasn’t actually bad anyway. At the end, we were two happy couples with full stomachs. Afterwards, we walked back to our hotel and called it a night, although we stayed till 3 AM to watch the Oscars award that was happening in Hollywood, CA.