Photographs from Germany (which I now thoroughly hate, hahaha):
Before we left for the airport, we had a last lunch date with Natalia who was flying back home to the UK the follow day. Wanted to visit my favourite cafe but it was closed so we visited an Italian restaurant nearby which was really pricey; we had fun nonetheless (:
Bye bye British kitty! :')
Heading for our 11 day trip comprising of 2 countries, 6 cities.
Arrived at Berlin in the evening to sweltering heat. We were pretty unlucky because it was apparently the hottest week in Germany (usually the temperature is pretty cool/manageable, even in the "summer" months). There were some train faults so it took us some time to get to our B&B.
After some struggling, we finally got to our B&B. Climbed a tiring 4 stories up before settling in and going downstairs AGAIN to get some food because we were starving. As usual, kebab stores offered the cheapest food option.
Day 1: Berlin, view from our B&B.
Berlin Wall, it was actually pretty lacklustre to me; expected a lot more.
Brandenburg Gate
War Memorial. By the time we got here, we had been walking for almost 2-3 hours in the blazing sun. It was terrible, I think the heat was a huge contributing factor to the start of my dislike of Germany. This was elevated further when I got molested by a disabled person who was petitioning for something or other at a park, the memory leaves me in disgust still.
Bright side: I found an adorable postcard for the boy! Apparently held a real piece of the Berlin Wall with it, hahaha.
Visited the Bauhaus Museum. It was pretty interesting but also pricey and the staff were kinda snotty. No photos allowed but I sneaked a couple in, oops (I mean, I paid a fair amount to get in right? I just want some memories, come on).
Major throwback to NP MCM days when we took Graphic Comm under CKK and had to design things in Bauhaus style. That had be struggling for a while, lol.
Some pretty cool postcards sold at the Bauhaus store, but they were too expensive to buy.
The thing about Germany is that the weather is apparently so lovely most days, that they don't have air-conditioning for the absolutely sweltering days. The museum was the first place we came across that had AC so we stayed there a little longer for a drink/cake. I was so dehydrated despite constantly drinking up.
Byebye Bauhaus.
We meant to go to the Jewish Communism Museum after the Bauhaus visit but it turned out that we arrived at the wrong place. We were too hot and tired to re-route so we decided to head back to our B&B for dinner since we had to be back early-ish to get ready for our overnight train ride to Frankfurt anyway. Met an adorable little friend enroute home :3
Mexican place downstairs the apartment for dinner!
The overnight train wasn't the most comfortable, but we've had worse.
Day 2: Frankfurt Arrived at 6am in the morning but could only check in at 9.30am, we were still grateful for the early check in though. Snoozed for a while before heading out.
Fish&Chips in a box for lunch!
Frankfurt Church; it's much more of a political monument than a place of worship. I'm not sure if they actually even hold any services here.
Old Town Frankfurt. I liked Frankfurt a lot more than Berlin, the places of interest seemed to be more beautiful. Also, the weather was less hot.
Eiserner Steg
Visited the German Museum of Photography, this was pretty cool. It charted the history of how photography and film came to be.
This is one of my favourites, it is the view through deep paper cutouts.
View from the side.
Optical illusions used to create the impression of moving images.
One of the first cameras.
Playing with the green screen, hahaha.
Finally traipsed back "home". Our B&B was on the Berger Strausse street which is apparently a street full of bars and restaurants, but after walking for more than 20mins, we did not find anything that interested us. Ended up having Asian fried rice which was pretty good! Another strange thing about Germany is that little to none of the establishments had free wifi. The ONLY public place that I found with free wifi in all 3 cities was at the Bauhaus Museum, baffling.
Day 3: Frankfurt. "All you can eat" breakfast in the following morning. The menu was fixed, 2 pieces of bread, 2 pieces of salami & ham & cheese, assorted spreads, potatoes&bacon, your choice of eggs, and a croissant each. It was way.too.much.
Here we visited the Goethe Haus.
Goethe's courtyard.
Then the Goethe Museum.
Took a walk outside and found Sam's pub! Cheap cocktails but we didn't have the time nor mood for that.
St Bartholomew.
Museum for Modern Art. I loved this, the entire museum was organised into a giant exhibit inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. The 3 floors represented the 3 levels; all works were contributed by African artists but they were not a direct representation of Dante's work per se, rather, they consisted of personal/modern interpretations of it. The exhibit conveys the ability of the work to be experienced and felt through different spaces and times in a variety of ways.
Exhausted from the long day, we decided to hunt for the famous German Pork Knuckles! It was really good, not as fatty as we thought it would be.
Day 4: Munich. We took an early bus to Munich from Frankfurt and only had a couple of hours here before we headed to Venice. Our only plan was to head to a lovely garden to have a picnic.
Munich was by far my favourite German city out of the three because it seemed a lot more tranquil, yet more city-like at the same time. Not too sure how to describe how I felt about it.
Picnic was slightly uncomfortable because the ground wasn't very grassy and kinda had a lot of duck shit...
They also walked dangerously near to us staring at our food, I had to stand up and shoo them every now and then.
And we had tiramisu!
Finally took a train to the airport to fly off the Venice!
Fast forward 7 days, we arrived in Berlin again on our last day of travels so that we could fly back to Stockholm in the night. We were waaaay too exhausted to do much because we arrived at 8am. So we went in search of the famous Currywurst.
Complete with a grumpy German man.
It was really yummy though!
We spent the rest of the day freezing and shopping (the temperature had dropped drastically from the last time we were there), eating and then heading back to the airport; but not before we got issued a fine at the German train station for "having the wrong ticket". We were accused of attempting to cheat the system etc etc, totally spoiled my excited mood to get home to Sweden (the trip really tired me out). Spent much of the evening down in the dumps after that, to add to our troubles, our flight was also delayed, causing us to miss the last bus home and having to take an expensive cab ride... Nonetheless, it was pretty cool.. pretty cool... I'll update on Italy soon, that we enjoyed a whole lot more than goddamned Germany :P
