We had a lot of fun during the rest of our time in Berlin. We found an absolutely INCREDIBLE bookstore called Dussmann. It was 5 floors filled with every genre of book you can imagine (mostly in German, but they did have a small English Sci-Fi/Fantasy section). They’re music collection was really impressive. They had a whole floor dedicated to classical music that even had a wide selection of opera on DVD. I wanted to buy all sorts of stuff but it was pretty expensive and of course DVDs would be in the wrong format for American players.
We decided to finally do some tourist stuff on our last day and we headed to the Reichstag building. My camera was broken and I hadn’t yet found a disposable camera so I couldn’t take any pictures. There happened to be a protest going on so we stopped to check it out. They were protesting nuclear power. They had signs that said, “Atomkraft? Neine Danke” which means, “Nuclear power? No thank you!” Strangely, we did see a nuclear power plant on our way to Wurtzburg (the next day). It was an eerie sight. We saw the smoke from kilometers away, long before we saw the plant itself. I’d never seen one in real life but it looked just like it does in movies.
To get to Frankfurt we decided to rent a car. We perhaps bit off more than we could chew because it was only after making the decision that we realized that automatic transmissions are somewhat rare here and they cost a lot more to rent. So… stick shift it is. The thing is…neither of us really drive stick. Keith didn’t bring his license so he couldn’t drive anyway. My boyfriend, Ryan, has been teaching me to drive manual on his car, but I’m still not very good at it. I knew it would be an in
We had a lot of fun during the rest of our time in Berlin. We found an absolutely INCREDIBLE bookstore called Dussmann. It was 5 floors filled with every genre of book you can imagine (mostly in German, but they did have a small English Sci-Fi/Fantasy section). They’re music collection was really impressive. They had a whole floor dedicated to classical music that even had a wide selection of opera on DVD. I wanted to buy all sorts of stuff but it was pretty expensive and of course DVDs would be in the wrong format for American players.
We decided to finally do some tourist stuff on our last day and we headed to the Reichstag building. My camera was broken and I hadn’t yet found a disposable camera so I couldn’t take any pictures. There happened to be a protest going on so we stopped to check it out. They were protesting nuclear power. They had signs that said, “Atomkraft? Neine Danke” which means, “Nuclear power? No thank you!” Strangely, we did see a nuclear power plant on our way to Wurtzburg (the next day). It was an eerie sight. We saw the smoke from kilometers away, long before we saw the plant itself. I’d never seen one in real life but it looked just like it does in movies.
To get to Frankfurt we decided to rent a car. We perhaps bit off more than we could chew because it was only after making the decision that we realized that automatic transmissions are somewhat rare here and they cost a lot more to rent. So… stick shift it is. The thing is…neither of us really drive stick. Keith didn’t bring his license so he couldn’t drive anyway. My boyfriend, Ryan, has been teaching me to drive manual on his car, but I’m still not very good at it. I knew it would be an interesting drive.
We picked up the car in the morning and I managed to peel out of the parking lot instead of stalling. Good. But we had neglected to figure out how to get to the freeway from the rental place. We had a road atlas, but it was really for going between cities and didn’t have enough detail to help us find our way within Berlin. So we drove around looking for it for a couple of hours. In the process I managed to stall quite a few times (you know it’s always 1st gear).
After a few truly frustrating experiences, we were in sight of the freeway. The car stalled really badly and we had to push it over to the side and wait. After a half hour or so we were ready to try again. We made it the last 20 meters onto the freeway and from there it was smooth sailing all the wait to Wurtzburg. We had more trouble with the car in Wurtzburg and pushed it to the side of the road. We were planning to sleep in Wurtzburg anyway so we reclined the seats and tried to sleep. Neither of us slept particularly well and we left again after about 3.5 hours. We went into Frankfurt and found the hauptbahnhof (where we would return the car in the morning). Then we went back out of town to a truck stop and slept until 7.
At 7 we drove back into Frankfurt and ended up hitting a little of the local commute traffic. We had a very frustrating experience trying to return the car. I recommend against renting with Europcar. They have never heard the term “customer service”. We ended up having to fork over three euros for parking because Europcar can’t mark their parking lot to save their souls. After cursing them profusely, we finally got the car dropped off and paid for and we headed to the hostel. The hostel is right across the street from the hauptbahnhof. We left our bags at the hostel but we couldn’t check in until 2pm (it was only 10am).
We wandered around town and took some pictures of the cool skyscrapers and found a nice park and some cool shops. Unfortunately, we didn’t find the statue of Beethoven in the nude that my friends saw when they were in Frankfurt. Oh well. At 2:00 we checked into the hostel and went to sleep! We slept for probably 4 hours and then went out again. We took our instruments to a nearby park and played a little. We played a piece that I wrote for us. Admittedly, it’s still a work in progress, but hey, I call that a European premier! We’re really excited to go home tomorrow. We’re looking forward to sleeping in bedrooms that don’t have several other people in them. In the morning we’ll go to the hauptbahnhof (after our free breakfast) and catch the next train over to the airport. We’ve had a lot of great experiences here but we’re ready to come home now. California, here we come!
teresting drive.
We picked up the car in the morning and I managed to peel out of the parking lot instead of stalling. Good. But we had neglected to figure out how to get to the freeway from the rental place. We had a road atlas, but it was really for going between cities and didn’t have enough detail to help us find our way within Berlin. So we drove around looking for it for a couple of hours. In the process I managed to stall quite a few times (you know it’s always 1st gear).
