Communist History and an 11 Euro Haircut in Berlin

Yikes!! I know I got back from Berlin almost three weeks ago, but the blog's finally here.

We spent our first day in Berlin doing a fantastic free walking tour, which took us to pretty well all of the highlights of the city. Luckily we all agreed we were most interested Cold War era East and West Berlin, so we returned on our own to the Berlin Wall's East Side Gallery, the DDR Museum, and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum was huge! We thought it was only a few rooms, but it just kept going and going. So many stories of escape attempts, people got really creative.

One of my favourite parts of Berlin was Kastanienallee in Prenzlauer Berg, an area which reminded me a bit of Commercial Drive in Vancouver. We spent some time shopping there and found a cafe serving pay-what-you-can vegan food! We had delicious soup and cake, and payed full price because even that wasn't much.

Nearing the end of our stay in Berlin, we of course heard about the Icelandic volcano. Luckily Angie and I had already booked our train tickets to Koln and then Brussels, but Gab and Sanne were in a bit of a scramble to find an alternate way to their destinations. After Sanne and Gab were on their way by train, Angie and I had a leisurely day in Berlin, visiting the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (it was destroyed by bombs but left standing as a reminder), seeing what we could of the Berlin Zoo from outside the fence (actually quite a lot), playing on a very adult friendly playground (it had a cool see-saw, and zip-line type thing!), and getting 11 euro haircuts at a place just down the road from our hostel (and they were great haircuts too!). It was then time to grab our bags and catch our midnight train to Koln.
Our two days visiting Koln and Bonn were great too. We discovered that the Koln U-bahn has a line all the way to Bonn (1 hour), so getting there was really easy. We had fantastic weather, and it was lovely to walk along the Rhine, or sit on a plaza and eat ice cream. We saw Beethoven's house in Bonn, and the Kolner Dom (the giant, blackened cathedral in the centre of town that has never been cleaned).

Best Moments in Kiev

Since it worked well for Krakow, I'll do this one in a list too.

10 best moments, in no particular order:

1. Having a personal walking tour drawn on our map for us. --When we asked the guy running the desk at our hostel if there were any free walking tours of Kiev he said "Ah, walking tours, yes!" and proceeded to draw a line through the city of where we should go, giving a running commentary and circling important things. It turned out to be a great little tour, I think we completed the whole thing in pieces during the time we were there.

2. Kievo Pecharsky Lavra --The Cave Monastery. It was amazingly beautiful, and gave us a great view of the city too. We walked through the catacombs where there were some bodies from the 11th century that didn't decompose. That part was really creepy.

3. Seeing the Ukrainian President drive by, twice --Okay so maybe it wasn't the president, but when we were walking from the Presidential palace to a nearby park there were police directing traffic and then a black car drove by with a police escort. We kept walking and on the next road it drove by again, pulling up to the parliament building a few blocks from us. So perhaps the president was being escorted to parliament? It was the middle of the day.

4. Puzata Hata --The buffet-style restaurant that became our regular lunch (and sometimes dinner) spot. So delicious and so cheap. Perogies with cherries, cottage cheese or poppyseed stuffed crepes, apple-filled things that were somewhere between a pastry and crepe, and these great little pancakes called "oladke." I always left there in a great mood.

5. Being able to read menus in cyrillic! --Okay, this is just my moment to be proud because the little bit of Russian I've learned came in handy. Luckily, Ukrainian names for different types of food aren't too different. And for words I didn't know, I could just read them out to Gab who speaks fluent Slovak and she could translate if they were similar words. It was a pretty good system!

6. Taking the metro --We didn't do it very often, we walked most of Kiev, but it was an experience! Everything moved really really fast, from the escalator that whisked us away to the platform, to the metro trains which produced massive gusts of wind as they blasted by, to the people running from one train to the next. I know metros are supposed to be fast, but everything about this one really was. I also loved how there were chandeliers in the metro stations, and almost no handles in the trains so every time it stopped and started I fell over.

7. Seeing a group of old men sitting by the water playing chess. --Well, this explains itself.

8. Randomly coming across a group of older Ukrainians doing some kind of circle dance in the entrance to the metro -- To get back to our hostel we had walk through a few underground passageways (instead of crosswalks) and a lot of them connected to the metro. One night we descended the stairs and found a little band set up and people dancing, directly under the street! An old man came up and asked me something in Ukrainian, I told him I didn't speak Ukrainian. He said "Deutsch?" and I said no, English or French. Then he said "Ah! Frantzuski!" and continued to speak in Ukrainian. I continued to speak in English, telling him I didn't know what he was saying, and the conversation continued on like this for quite some time. I think he might've be asking me to dance, and I tried to explain I don't know the dance. Of course I could be completely wrong, we were really having two entirely different conversations.

9. Andriivsky uzviz --This was a steep, winding street topped by the gorgeous turquoise St. Andrew's church. The streets were lined with the only tourist stands in Kiev, where Gab and I bought what seemed like the last two patches in all of Kiev, and there were also a lot of stands and stores for local artisans selling jewelry and paintings and things.

10. St. Sophia's --This was really cool because the church was set up like a bit of an archaeology museum. The outside showed some of what the church looked like when it was first built, and inside there were sections of the floor which showed uncovered mosaics.

Having enjoyed ourselves immensely in Kiev, we headed off to get our flight to Berlin via Riga, Latvia. So I can say I've had an aerial view of Latvia, and that the airport in Riga was really nice!

Highlights of Krakow

Alright, it's taking me a long time to get out these blog posts so I'm going to do this short form.

Things we did in Krakow:

Walking tour of the Jewish Quarter --A really good idea, most of the things we wouldn't have noticed on our own, or heard the story to go with them. Like this store that wanted to recreate how the area used to look by making several mock store fronts.

Auschwitz and Birkenau tour --What can I say here that you don't already know? It was depressing, frightening, and unnerving. I felt weird about taking pictures there so I have none.

Vodka tasting --Such a student touristy thing to do, but hey, I discovered vodka can actually taste nice (when it's good Polish vodka mixed with apple juice!). We also got free pickles. Mmmm.

Visited the 24 hour perogy joint, more than once --So many kinds of perogies to try and so little time!

Met tons of awesome people at our amazing hostel --Some joined us for the various tours, vodka tasting, and other wanderings about town.

Met up with some friends from Brussels who drove to Krakow --Again, they joined us for various wanderings.

Wawel castle --Fire-breathing dragon anyone?

So basically our time in Krakow was full of fun-filled adventures, the food was delicious and cheap, shopping was good, we had great weather for the most part, and our hostel was so friendly and served us a delicious breakfast every morning and pasta for dinner some nights. What could be better? So, of course, we were sad to leave. But the next destination on our list promised to be interesting too, Kiev!

The Adventures Begin: Oslo

My two week Easter break vacation started with a visit to a friend from home, Dena, who's doing her exchange in Aas, a town just to the south of Oslo. I stayed with Dena in her dorm while my three other travelling companions, Gab, Angie, and David, did the hostel thing.

We arrived from Brussels on Saturday morning and Dena hadn't yet returned from her vacation (theirs was the week before ours), so we went to the Munch museum and met up with Dena when she arrived (straight from the airport!) that afternoon. We took a little walk around the city and then went to the ice bar, where they gave us parkas and mittens to go inside and drink cocktails out of ice glasses! We all went a little crazy with the picture taking.

That night Dena and I ventured to take the second to last train to Aas (10:20pm) only to find out it wasn't running because it was Easter weekend! So we waited in the lobby of the Radisson hotel until the last train 2 hours later. Once in Aas, it was a half hour trek to Dena's dorm. It was actually quite beautiful, I could see the stars for the first time in awhile!

Day 2 had me waiting for another train (we just couldn't quite figure out the Easter schedule), but I got to enjoy a nice morning in Aas and see the little bit of snow that was left. Dena stayed home to work on a paper that day, so I met up with the others in Oslo and we took a boat ride from city hall to the opera house to Oslo's Museum Island. It was a really nice ride, we saw a bunch of little islands with cabins on them, and the scenery reminded me a lot of BC.
On Museum Island we visited the Kon-Tiki Museum, which was all about the adventures of a guy named Thor who built a raft and sailed across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia, and then later took a reed boat across the Atlantic. I learned he was responsible for the whole Kon-Tiki craze, with Tiki hut bars and all.

In the afternoon we visited the sculpture park, where there are a whole bunch of statues of people doing different things, all by the same sculptor. One of the most famous ones is the stomping baby, who seems like he's too young to be throwing a tantrum standing up.

Monday morning I spent in Aas, since our flight was leaving that afternoon and I was already on the shuttle route to the airport. So I walked the other half of Aas to get to the bus station! I said goodbye to Dena and to Norway and met up with the others to catch our flight to Krakow, Poland.

Oslo was neat, but I'm really glad I got to stay in Aas because the small town outdoorsy-ness is what really appealed to me about Norway.