A Fat Adventure!: Well that was weird....

Berlin!!!!
So much history, so much culture, so many strange things...
Where to start?!
Luckily this is both of our favourite stop so far, seeing as going to Berlin is the whole point of this trip!
We've wandered past checkpoint Charlie and several sections off wall, all with large boards of information and photos which makes it very real. So far there's bits of history everywhere, none of it all that cheerful, a strange contrast to how fun Berlin is!
There's quite a few older buildings as well, it's really easy to forget that there are interesting bits in Germany's history pre-1900's too.
On friday night we walked through a square that was fenced off to contain a stage and seating for some kind of classical music concert, however most of the seats were empty as Berlin-ers of all ages were sat in deckchairs around the outside of the fence with packed lunches! That's proper culture; planning a picnic to not pay for opera with!
Again, we found the slightly more alternative part of the city and found out how hard it is to go through the filling in of the forms to get a piercing with our very basic German and all writing in German! We fumbled through and now Angus has a very fat lip!

Saturday evening we decided to be brave and go on an 'Alternative Pub Crawl'! There's a small company [It was just 1 Aussie bloke!] that put on quirky tours of various aspects of Berlin with the aim of showing people real life in the city with small groups and guides who live here. So we met our slightly peculiar group in a 60's themed hippy bar and set off! The group consisted of the slightly odd/drunk but very friendly tour guide, a couple of American guys there with a couple off Swiss guys, two Australians, a group of moustached guys from Devon on a stag do, a Mexican guy and us; all very drunk except for Carlos [the Mexican] and us, and all very male...
Second stop was a goth bar, half owned by members of the German metal band 'Rammestein'! After a small DJ set by apparently a member of The Prodigy, 2 Spanish men with a small guitar and some bongo type drums climbed up onto the bar and performed a few traditional Spanish songs. This performance was followed by 2 goth strippers dancing on the bar to the song 'You can leave your hat on'. Confused?! We definitely were!
We were then all summoned outside ready for the next bar and set off in a very erratic manner to a seemingly derelict shop. A DJ had set up some decks on a folding table, a makeshift bar had been made and a table tennis table has been put up; we watched the most surreal and fun game of Round Robbin ever!
Next the tour guide led us to the stairs of a multi storey car park and we trustingly followed him up 6 sets of stairs to the top floor which had been turned into a roof top beach bar complete with sand!
A speedy drink then we were off again!
By this point the group had descended into chaos, the journeys seemed to have no forward planning, jumping onto u-bahn trains and hoping we were all on!
The last place on the tour was a club underneath an old swimming pool, full of arty looking German 20somethings. The strange semi-derelict place consisted of several floors [I don't think we found all of them], old pumping rooms, rooms with no lights and endless corridors and piping. We never found the actual swimming pool but did end up outside at one point in the search, only to be sent back in by the slightly out of place looking bouncers. As smoking is still legal inside in most of Europe, the clouds of smoke further added to the mildly claustrophobic environment!
We'd heard that the party was on until monday morning but by 3am we and our now adopted Mexican decided we had not drunk enough for it to get any better and it was perhaps time to leave. Which posed the question of where we actually were?!
After some slight u and s-bahn confusion we made it back to the hotel, realising that as we'd only booked 2 nights previously we had to pack and checkout by 11am on sunday, ready to check back into our new rooms in the same hotel after 3pm. At an impressive 10.30am we were stood at the reception, ignoring the pain of 5 hours sleep and a fair amount of alcohol only to be told that the hotel had meant to get in touch with us on saturday to let us know that rooms had been re-jiggled and we now could stay where we were. Not amusing at the time!
Today is the day of salad, fruit and sleep!