Bleak Berlin

With my arm in agonizing pain, we took the night train from Vienna to Berlin. Kimmy was very helpful and made my bed for me and put my hair up in a ponytail (thanks baby!). We got to Berlin at 7am, and 3 wrong trains later, we arrived at our hostel at 10am (after this trip I will never trust the two of us to travel anywhere alone together without adult supervision – here is a fun game: read through all of my blog posts and see how many times we ended up lost or on the wrong train, then add about 10 more to that because I left a few out. Whoever guesses correctly get’s to come with me on my next trip!). Since we still had the whole day ahead of us, we dumped our backpacks in our room (at the 3 Little Pigs Hostel which is an old Abby so there are tons of little secret passages and long hallways. It would have been cool had there been lights inside so we could find our room after it got dark). We bundled up and headed out into the snowy German day to see what we could see through the blizzard. Berlin is apparently famous for their Christmas markets, so it was a great time for us to be there. We found our first market in the middle of a place called Potsdamer Platz (hehe, funny name) and walked around under the Christmas lights and garland. There also happened to be a huge man made snow hill which you could tube down. Like I said, a gimpy left arm wasn’t going to keep me from doing anything fun, so Kimmy and I (the 10 year olds) ran up the hill and got our tubes to go sledding. We got a big push from the man working there, but somehow Kimmy came to a complete stop halfway down the hill. I went barreling down the hill and crashed into her and then carried on down the hill (that felt really good on my arm, let me tell you) while Kimmy had to have reinforcements come rescue her and give her a second push to get to the bottom. Now that we were wet and cold from our tube adventure (or lack there of) we indulged in a little retail therapy in the Christmas markets where I bought a new pair of gloves to replace my soaking wet ones. After my purchase of new warm clothing, I was ready to see some sights. And so the checklist begins:

-The Berlin Wall
-The Holocaust Memorial
-The Holocaust Museum
-The Brandenburg Gate
-The Parliament Building (where we climbed up the glass dome up top)
-Sachenhausen Concentration Camp

Every site in Berlin has something to do with war, holocaust, division or some general negative historical event. The grey skies and the bitter cold were just the icing on the cake. How did we keep ourselves from getting severely depressed in the country of despair? Conundrums! When I was much younger I remember my Dad giving us conundrums and I remembered a few of them. For those of you who haven’t heard of these, someone basically gives you some sort of fictional situation, and everyone has to guess how it happened or what is going on by asking questions that can only receive a yes or no response. For example, “A man goes into a field and dies, how did it happen?” We met up with a couple of guys who followed us around like puppy dogs who happened to love my conundrums. Thank god that they were better than the homophobe and the mute, but we nicknamed these two Lame-o #1 and Lame-o #2, no explanation needed (although, they did love my conundrums, so I should reconsider naming them Awesome #1 & #2). All throughout Berlin, our little puppy dogs would be silently thinking and then suddenly yell out random questions like “is it a real man?” or “was he playing baseball and a lighthouse fell on him which killed him?” It was a fun way to distract ourselves when we were moving from one depressing sight to another. The train ride home from the concentration camp had some of the best conundrums because we all needed a serious pick-me-up after that little outing as you can imagine.

So here is my own little conundrum for you: A train takes them to their next destination. They look out the window and see the London Eye. What happened?