Vacation in Berlin

The budget ticket flight.

Welcome desk at Berlin's Tegel airport.

In the plaza of the Sony Center

Red Carpet reception of course.

Notice the Stars and Stripes!

This is a tram.  It runs at street level.

U station for subway.

All rails lead to Berlin.

Roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans.

Coffee shop near Friedrichstrasse on the Schpre River

Apfelstrudel with vanilla sauce

Berliner's are fruit filled donuts.

Even Peace Corps Volunteers get vacation.  The past week has been an exciting time in Berlin.  My fellow PCV Sylvia and I headed there primarily for the 64th Berlinale Film Festival.  The film festival was very enjoyable and so were many, many other things in Berlin.  The film festival had us chasing tickets and theaters all over the city.  But no problem for us since Berlin has a supersized transportation system composed of buses, trams, surface trains, and subways.  And you can transfer from one system to another without any trouble.  We never waited longer than 10 minutes for a connection.  And the people are very friendly and glad to give you directions.  I found the subway stations made me feel like I was in Chicago.  Berlin is a very cosmopolitan city (like Chicago).  You hear people speaking many different languages all around you.  And English is a very widely used second language there.  The first movie we saw at the festival was a film about Roma people living in Romania.  It was a lot like watching a "frontline special" about our Peace Corps experience.  The film was in Romanian, subtitles were in English.  So that one was a breeze for us Moldovan visitors.  But we saw two movies by Ken Loach that were set in middle England and the subtitles were in German.  My mind had a hard time deciding whether I would try and understand listening to the English dialect or reading the German.  Both were impossible.  The last film was Kreutzweg (Way of the Cross) in German with English subtitles.  A very powerful film by Dietrich Bruggemann that took the silver bear in it's class.  We enjoyed plenty of good German beer, great food, and even some bowling. (and salsa dancing too)  I'll have to continue in the next blog about the many museums and historical places we visited.  But just let me end this time with the immortal words of JFK "ich bin ein Berliner".