Over the next few days, in no particular order (I guess my notes aren’t detailed enough), I managed to see the church of Notre Dame (which was seriously lacking in Hunchbacks), Montmartre, and some other touristy sites. I also managed to meet up with Jazz and Zaq, a British/French friend who had lived with me in the International House at UCSD, and her boyfriend who is also from San Diego.
I also managed to get aboard the Bateaux Mouches with the entire UCLA study abroad group, with some help from Kim’s very generous professor.
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My morning mitfahr to Paris was a bit sketch. The guy driving spoke German with a strong French accent, which was definitely something I hadn’t heard before, and that led to some trouble getting our meeting point straight. I got lucky that it was like a little service that a few French guys had decided to run, and there was more than one mitfahr from Cologne to Paris that morning from the train station. Despite betting ditched by the first driver, there was a second ride available to get me to Paris.
My arrival in Paris was rainy, for the first time in what seemed like weeks. I had been dropped off in an area the opposite side of Paris from where I needed to be, so I made my way to the metro to begin the now-familiar exercise of learning a new metro system. After my experiences in Frankfurt, the Paris metro was very easy to manage, despite knowing little to no French.
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Leaving Mareike’s house in the morning quickly became an adventure when I realized I had left my coat in her house. I had planned my train journey to have less than 5 minutes to spare. Forgetting my jacket almost certainly meant that I would be late to meet my next mitfahr to Cologne.
I literally ran back to her house, regretably had to wake her up to get my coat, and then ran back to the train station to catch the next train, which was literally pulling into the station as I was going up the stairs of the entrance to the train station. I had to board the train without purchasing a ticket otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to board. Read More →
I took the train into Frankfurt to meet up with my first mitfahrgelegenheit which for all intensive purposes means ride-share. There were two other people sharing the ride as well, and it went by fairly quickly. Everyone was friendly and I got to get in some good practice speaking German since we are basically just sitting in the car together for about 7 hours.
We arrived in Berlin in an area called neukoln, and I made my way to the nearest subway to find out what region of Berlin that even was. Every subway has a massive map, so they are pretty useful for getting your bearings, even if you won’t take the train. I ducked into a little internet cafe to find out where a good hostel was located, snapped a photo of the google maps page on my camera, and set off to find BaxPax Kreuzberg.
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My Ryanair flight from Milano to Frankfurt only cost me about 40 euro (1/4 the cost of the train), and was just a 1-hour jump over the alps. Strangely enough, the bus ride from the airport to the city takes longer than the flight (because I took a budget airline). On the flight I was seated next to a American family that lived in Germany because daddy was a soldier, and on the bus ride from Frankfurt I was sitting with some Canadians.
On the bus ride from the Hahn Airport I made friends with Tim & Alan, two Canadians who were visiting Germany and Scotland on a little vacation. They had once lived in Frankfurt awhile ago, so I talked to them about the city, and learned a bit about what it was like for them to live there. We managed to talk the entire bus ride in, and once we arrived some time after midnight I set off to find a hostel in Frankfurt. Read More →
