Groningen to Berlin; Monday May 2

Monday morning started bright and early. Bright was good, I love when the sun is up for so long.. anyways I was up at around 6:30 to make it to my 8:20 train.

I made it to the station and met a bunch of people from my student house, we were on the first few trains together, they were headed to the Bremen airport to catch a flight to Ibiza, Spain.

My train took me into Germany, then through a couple of transfers, one of which was through Hamburg, then onto Berlin. This was intended to take around 6 hours, but because one train was late, (Bremen to Hamburg) it made me miss my connector train, which then caused the next train to be moved to another platform then the one I was waiting on for it - and because I don't speak Germany - I missed that one as well. Luckily for me a nice German girl who was looking for the same train asked and then relayed the message back to me that I would need to wait just over an hour until after 2 for the train.

In the meantime I walked around the Hamburg train station, it was pretty fair sized, I stopped at Subway and accidentally agreed to getting all the veggies on it, and waited. It was quite cold. I was not prepared for this.

Unfortunately the next train (the just after 2pm train) was about 35 minutes late so this made me even more late. Well not late as in I needed to be here at a certain time, it just added about 2.5hrs to my transit time.

I arrived at Berlin's central station and wondered around it, seemingly lost for a while, that place is huge! Eventually I found the metro system which is either marked with an S or a U, not an M. Oh this English only things gets me.

I made it to the hotel easily enough, around 5:30 and checked in. I dropped my stuff off and headed to Checkpoint Charlie, which is only 1 block away from the hotel. It was quite interesting to read all the information posted about the area and see where the Berlin Wall actually sat. It was so surreal. I kept wondering, but not really knowing where I was going I ended up meandering around a lot of residential looking areas. I kept thinking how I would have been so much smarter had I brought warmer clothes.

I made sure to be back at the hotel by 7 because that was when my cousin had projected she would arrive.

When she did arrive you could tell we were both quite excited about it! We've talked for years about me coming to visit her in England, where she lives, or us seeing each other in the Netherlands so it was so great to actually make it happen.

We did some catching up, it has been since Christmas since I had seen her, before we headed out to find somewhere to eat. With no real plan we just started walking, it took a little while but we did find somewhere, it was across the street from many large stately buildings. We figured while in Germany you must drink beer, we would not regret this decision.

It was a lovely evening. It was so nice to see a familiar face from home, even if she is no longer "from home," she still is in my mind. It was really lovely to see her. This week is going to be great.

After dinner we came back to plan Tuesday. Having one full day in Berlin we knew that would mean seeing a lot in one day, we were up for it.

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I'll do Tuesday's post later, too much to write about and too little motivation on my part. But have I mentioned how excited I am that it is May?! Yay. May is a great month.