"The best laid schemes of mice and men/ Go often askew" ("To a Mouse" by Robert Burns)This past week Mehmet and I went to Berlin. The plan was to spend Wednesday traveling to Berlin, then have one entire day there on Thursday, and leave Friday to get back home Friday night. This was the cheapest way, and I also thought it wouldn't be too difficult to do Berlin in a day since I've done so many other cities in a day (Munich, Madrid, New York City, D.C., etc.). I'm not much of a museum-goer, so that saves a lot of time.
So, Wednesday morning we started on our journey. Everything seemed to be going rather smoothly. We met with other travelers with mitfahrgelegenheit, and they were all very nice. Then, in Stuttgart we experienced our first little glitch. Mehmet was walking ahead of me and the other girl we had met. He was walking fast, because we only had about 5 minutes to catch our train, carrying a backpack, which was his overnight bag, and wearing camouflage shorts, his favorite pair. All of a sudden, I saw two police officers quickly approach him. They asked for his ID. Me and the other girl caught up with him and started standing there with him. I was trying to figure out what had happened and why the officers stopped him. The officers asked us if we were all together, and when we responded "yes", there seemed to be a slight hesitation. The officer knew at that point there was no problem, but he had already asked for Mehmet's ID, so he also asked for ours. At this point, I was getting a phone call from the other 2 girls from mitfahrgelegenheit who were waiting for us and I had to inform the officers that our train was leaving in about 2 minutes. They started walking us to the platform, and we were luckily able to make the train. Looking back on the situation, Mehmet and I are sure that it was racial profiling (he's Turkish), but there wasn't a lot we could do about it. At least we made our train.
We made it to the next stop, and the train we took from there was 5-10 minutes late....and we only had 5 minutes to get to the next train. Luckily, the next train was also delayed, so we were able to make it. The next train was also delayed, but we wanted to check to see if there was another direct train we could take, to avoid being rushed or missing later trains. We decided to take the original train, but after we boarded, we were told the part of the train we had boarded was disconnected from the main train that was going to our next stop. When we got off, the other part of the train had already started leaving. So, we had to take a later train. That train was on time, and gave us some time to eat (we hadn't had anything since 9am and it was about 5pm). Then, we had to take a train from Leipzig to Berlin, which had one stop of about 5 minutes in between. However, the train from Leipzig was about 10 minutes late....and it was the LAST train to Berlin until the morning. So, we rushed over to information and explained our situation. Three of us were girls, so if all else failed, I figured we could put on the waterworks. Luckily, they were very understanding, and they said they would hold the train for us. So, we were finally able to make it to Berlin at about midnight. Well, we made it to the Berlin Hauptbahnhof at about midnight, and we still had to get to our hostel.
The information I read had said that our hostel was on a U-Bahn line that went directly from the main train station to our stop. However, that information was wrong. So, we found the U-Bahn, then we had to figure out all the connections to get to our hostel. Everything was okay, or so we thought. Turns out we went in the wrong direction on the last line....and we didn't realize it for several stops. Finally, when we realized it we thought we could just hop off and go in the other direction. We didn't know, however, that there was construction in the other direction. So, we decided to get on an S-Bahn line that should have taken us directly there. The only problem was it was already about 1:15am, and so the S-Bahn line we were on didn't run anymore. We tried asking someone who worked for the train for directions and he basically blew us off. That was when I started crying. It's amazing how much men hate to see a woman cry....he managed to give us specific details of when and where we needed to go by making a simple call. So, by 2am we thought we were on a bus going to where we needed to be. We thought there was only one bus, but apparently there was another, because once again we were going in the wrong direction. So, we got off the bus. It was after 2am, and we were completely lost on the outskirts of Berlin. We started walking, then Mehmet pulled me aside because we saw three people that were most likely doing drugs. We both had wallets full of cash, so it was a situation we didn't want to cross. Then we saw a police car. We ran to them asking for help, Mehmet started speaking to them in English and tried to tell them about the people doing drugs, but I don't think they understood. Finally they told us to just get a taxi. We did. Twenty-five minutes and €25 later we had arrived to our hostel. (Part 2)
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