All we wanted were a few peaceful hours of uninterrupted sleep on that restless, 8.5 hour flight before we hit the ground running. But sleep had other plans. Sleep evaded us.
I lifted my window shade around 7:30 am...and there, sprawling out below me in shades of green and brown, was Germany. Suddenly, that missing sleep seemed like a distant thought, a fleeting memory. Unimportant. (Ya know, until about 10 hours later, when it took every muscle in our bodies to keep our heavy eyelids open and our heads off our dinner plates...)
When you are running on excitement and adrenaline, things seem to take forever. Like waiting on the plane to taxi to a stop...waiting for the stairs to roll up to the plane door...waiting for the slow people in front of you to actually walk down said stairs...waiting for the bus on the tarmac to drive you over to the main airport...waiting in the custom lines with other loud Americans that make you shake your head and say, "Aaaaand that's why Europeans don't like Americans." Finally, all the waiting is over. The plane ride, the lines. The months spent planning your two week excursion of Germany have culminated to the very moment that you burst through the doors into the front entrance of the Berlin airport...
And realize you have no idea what to do next.
Hubs and I stood like two travel-weary sojourners, oversized backpacks in place, staring up at the airport signs all barking at us in a foreign tongue. Words that my months of self-taught German had not prepared me for. How on this side of the Atlantic were we supposed to get to the train station? A little detail I should have figured out in all my planning. Word of advice to future travelers: Figure out how to get to the train station from the airport. Before you actually get to the airport.
After a doe-eyed bat of my lashes at Hubs, I suggested we ask the lady at the information desk for help. Thankfully, she directed our path to the bus station in front of the airport and told us which bus we would need for the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (train station). Now came the task of figuring out how to buy a bus ticket...
Enter: Very Nice German Man.
Very Nice German Man obviously had an eye for picking out slightly confused tourists, and like a tall, lanky, excellent English-speaking mother hen, he took us under his wing and not only helped us buy our tickets, but he got them stamped by the driver and then rode on the bus with us all the way to der Bahnhof. We learned a lot about him in that 20 minute ride, but never his name. Either way, he gave us a great first impression of German people. And I think he even feigned being impressed by my shaky first attempt at using German. "Nett sie kennenzulernen!" I told him. Which translates to "Nice to meet you!" He smiled and laughed and shook our hands, telling us that he felt the same. And just like that, he was gone, and we were headed into the Hauptbahnhof, feeling much more relaxed in our new setting.
Once inside the enormous infrastructure that is Berlin's central train station, we got our rail passes stamped and wandered around until we found our S-Bahn (like the elevated train system here in Chicago) platform. We loved the S-Bahn system of Germany. Fast, big, clean, efficient. In no time at all, we had traveled 4 stops to Savignyplatz, where our first hotel of the trip awaited us.
Pension Peters sat around the corner from a cobblestone courtyard lined with restaurants and shops at the entrance to the S-Bahn stop. It was an old, renovated apartment building full of life and charm and the kindest, most friendly hotel staff you'd ever have the pleasure of meeting.
We headed up an old marble staircase to our beautiful vintage-meets-mod room to drop off our bags and bounded right back down for Frühstück (breakfast) in the bright and cheery reception area.
German breakfast came to be our most favorite meal of the day. I still crave that bread and cheese and meat. No, no, it's not lunch; it's breakfast. And don't tell me we can just "eat a sandwich" to satiate our craving for real German breakfast. It's just not the same. It's not.
The first day in Germany was shaping up to be even better than we could have asked for. Despite our lack of sleep, we were excited and ready for a full day of exploring. So it was off to see what Berlin had in store!
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