Berlin Day 1

A piece of advice I was given by a student here at a UCL pub one night was, "Don't stick around for reading week, travel!" So that's exactly what my friends and I did, took 6 days to visit Berlin and Stockholm! Of course now I have lots of reading to do this weekend, as well as a paper due on Monday, but I can take some time to tell you about our trip, since it's the reason I have not posted in so long!

So, Berlin made lots of sense to us. I have a cousin currently studying abroad there (not in Munich as I previously thought, sorry Coerte!) so it was a great chance to catch up with him and be taken to the best pubs in the area by a semi-local. Yes, I was taken on my very first pub crawl! Stockholm ended up being a bit chilly and snowy to say the least, but two friends of mine have a friend studying abroad there, and it only costed us €17 (which is about 20 dollars) to fly from Berlin!! 

We left extremely early Friday morning to find ourselves surrounded by German by 9:30! We then made our way to our hostel, called Plus Berlin, which is beautiful and amazing by the way. I highly recommend Plus hostels for anyone needing a cheap, comfortable, safe, and clean place to stay. We'd not had very much sleep, but had limited time in the city so we ventured out to see what we could see!

Our first stop was Museum Island, named so because it is exactly that. An island in the middle of the city with a bunch of museums on it.

The Pergamon Museum 

The National Museum

We went to the Pergamon Museum that first day and were exhausted afterwards, but it was beautiful and so worth it. 

The Gates of Babylon 

 Hoping for an early night, we took some more pictures, some of a beautiful cathedral on Museum Island, and then headed back to the hostel for dinner at their restaurant.

Our first German beers!! 

We went to bed early that night so we could get up and moving the next morning. Which we did, so stories about our three hour tour are to come! Again sorry I haven't posted in so long, there will be many posts shortly about the trip. 

Have a wonderfully marvelous day, bitte! ~ Laura 

P.S. That's pronounced bitteh and essentially means cheers in German.

Tate Dilema

Megan and I planned to meet Liz and Grace at the Tate Museum after our walk around Covent Garden. We had previously looked up the hours of the museum, as everything around here seems to close at 6 o’clock. Luckily for us it stays open until 10 on Fridays! We can’t seem to get out of the flat in a timely manner so this was great news. It was about a 15 minute walk to the museum from Covent Garden; A beautiful walk at that in the pitch darkness of 5:15. The Thames was lit up with large boats and trees along the side with blue and white lights.

We bought some candied nuts on the way, which were sweet, crunchy, and delicious. They were the perfect pick-me-up precursor to the museum. The Tate is not particularly nice from the outside, you would not look at it and think, “oh, that’s a beautiful museum!” I will get a picture when we go in the daylight. We entered the museum and texted the other girls because they had already arrived. They told us the name of the gallery they were in and said there were signs for it everywhere. Upon looking around, we saw very few signs, and none with the name of this particular gallery. So we promptly asked two different museum guides who gave us funny looks and said they had no idea where this particular room was. After half an hour of texting back and forth, going from floor 1 to 0 to 2 back to 0 to 1 ect. we were frustrated and thought our problem was with the fact that we couldn’t figure out which floor to meet on or which gift shop to meet in front of.

Megan finally thought to ask Liz which Tate Museum they were at. “Tate Brittan” Liz responded. We just looked at each other and couldn’t do anything but laugh, as we were sitting in the Tate Modern. Only in London could we have confused two museums with the same name. Though quite flustered at the time, we decided that we would eventually look back on this story and think it funny. Next time we will be using the full names of these two particular museums when referring to them.

Megan and I were not very impressed by much of the extremely modern art at the Tate Modern, but there were a few pieces we did appreciate. We also attended a lecture on a couple of exhibits in British Sign Language (BSL)! I thought there would be an interpreter, but there was not. Knowing American Sign Language I was able to interpret most of it for Megan, but unfortunately missed about a third of what was being communicated. Even so, it was very cool, I was able to pick up on some BSL, and Megan said she had never had any exposure like that to Deaf people so she found it an interesting experience. All and all a success :) 

Have a wonderfully marvelous day, cheers! ~Laura