Freakishly Happy

Here is me in Berlin seeing if I can fit this street sign that we found into my little satchel bag. Sadly, it did not work. AND you can see what my hair looks like

Please excuse our neglect of the website, things are really startin' to heat up here in the 'burg, both literally and figuratively. With the temperature soaring above 30 degrees celcius (however warm that REALLY is, nobody knows), us getting ready to move, John getting ready to defend his thesis and me getting ready to wrap up the semester things are a bit crazy here.
But we have good ice cream to get us through, thank goodness!

BERLIN Part deux
The rest of my time in Berlin was good. That night after sleeping for several hours in our hotel, we went wandering about the town. We went to Alexander Platz, where they were showing World Cup games on BIG screen, with a couple thousand fans in attendance, walked through the Brandenburger Gates and into the German Parlament building. We had a great time in the Parlement building, more fun that probably should be had in a governmental house. We went to the top of the dome, kicked up our legs and looked at the star (really there was only one visible), played on the lights and made a whole bunch of people smile.

Then Christine and I met up with Hannah. Luckily it was Hannah's 22nd birthday. We went out for drinks and then went to a club. We then proceeded to dance the night away until the wee hours of the next morning. We met a whole bunch of cool, and some not so cool people. I have a thing about making up stories about where I from, not because I'm embarrassed about being from the US, but more because it's fun to make up stories. For that evening my name was Fiona and I was from Calgery, Alberta in Canada. We happened to meet some Canadians in the club, who were very fun ( Christine is also Canadian) this could have made my story problematic, but it didn't ;)
Go Oilers! (whatever that's supposed to mean).
As we were leaving the club some English soccer fans asked us to go to a pub with them. We were denied entrance to the first pub upon them showing the bouncers their passports (English soccer hooligans have a bad rep, even though these guys weren't fanatics they were still English) so we went a few doors down to the Irish Pub, a staple in every German city (even Freiburg has like 4 of them). We sat down, and I got to learn a whole bunch of useful, yet not very 'cultured" English expressions. We left the pub as the sun was rising and Chris and I saw Hannah off on her train while we went back to our hotel to crash.

We stayed awake until 7 o'clock breakfast, then crashed until mid afternoon. Then went and watched Germany win another World Cup game. The town went crazy after this, people hanging themselves out of car windows, horns blaring, music blaring, flags waving. We went back to our hotel and got dressed and went to meet up with Katie, Jenny and Jessica. We tried to get something together, but we'd gotten bad directions to the club and when we got there it was expensive and late so the other girls broke off, and we went into the club.
The place was pretty swank, with ICE train seats in one section complete with televisions in seatbacks, a big green swimming pool with catwalk, and hundreds of tiny disco balls above it, and techno music. Too bad the Germans are "too cool" to have really enjoyed it. Even the ones who were actually dancing were not dancing together. We stayed there for quite a while, people watched, danced a bit and head out. We walked around the city some more, tried and failed to find a bathroom and decided to cut our loses and go home.
We woke up for breakfast the next day, showered and packed up, and then went to see some sites. It was hotter than blazes, so we ended up just sitting on the steps of the Berlin opera house for a couple of hours in the shade, before moving to a park to sit in the grass in the shade. We saw the old Communist Palace that is being torn down, went to an book fair and an art fair and then went out for sushi for the second time that weekend, this time with Hannah and Katie ( I forgot to mention this earlier! we found a great sushi restaurant that had the revolving plates, and great cheap sushi. The really adorable waitress was the one who gave us directions to the club from the night before, the one with the green swimming pool). Absolutely stuffed beyond belief we wandered back to our hotel to pick up our stuff, and waddled back to the train station. We got on at a different station then the rest of the group which lead to some tense moments, but everything turned out okay. The ride home was much less eventful than the ride to Berlin. Sadly, as we were on the train the Netherlands lost to Portugal in the World Cup (Christine is Portuguese, so we had a major rivalry going over this game and the conductor kept having to come through and tell us the score) and I showed Hannah how to Indian leg wrestle as we were sitting in the bike area of the train, before we all went back to our seats to catch what little sleep we could manage.

So that in brief was our trip to Berlin. I will post pictures as soon as thing calm down a bit.