Today was incredibly long. It started bright and early (about 8:30am) with a quick shower, breakfast, and then out the door. Why? I had made plans to meet up with Timo's dad (Detleff) at around 10am to go for a 3.5 hour cruise of Berlin's canals and river.
We met up at Hansaplatz U-bahn station, walking over into Bellevue area of Tiergarten (all areas within central Berlin), and walked down to a dock next to the Spree (a river that flows through the city). We ended up having to wait about half an hour for the tour to start. No problem though - I always prefer to be a bit early and wait than to be late.
While there, we met up with two of Detlef's friends, one of whom was a neighbor. They both were incredibly nice and provided fun conversation during the cruise.
The cruise took off promptly at 11am, and started driving clockwise around the city. The driver provided commentary as we went along, a lot of which actually in the local Berlinerisch (berlin dialect of german). Detlef also speaks this dialect natively, which I got to listen to all day! Surprisingly it had a lot of features that Dutch has, i.e. using "t"s in a lot of places where Hochdeutsch (the "official" dialect of german) uses "s"s (examples: saying "wat" instead of "was" (which means "what"), or "det" instead of "das" (which means "that")). Needless to say, after the afternoon was over, I had a lot of data I could work on in analyzing differences between different dialects and different languages (moreover, why Berlinerisch is easier for a Hochdeutsch speaker to understand than Dutch).
Anyways, back to the tour...below are some pics:
Berliner Dom (left)
Our Cruiseboat
Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Train Station)
Free loader...
A cool locale on the side of the river
Oberbaumbrücke
Me with Detlef's friends
After the cruise was over, we headed over to Detlef's mother's house for coffee and cake. Another one of Detlef's friends joined us there as well. Everything was incredibly delicious. The cake was a light sponge cake on the bottom layer, topped with sweet cream, fruit sauce (rasberry I think), and sesame seeds - no pics, sorry! We stayed there for a few hours talking, and then all of us (except for Detlef's mother) walked to the U-bahn to head over to Neukölln to check out a big street festival there. We went into a few stores and bought some stuff, and then grabbed some dinner at this really great Thai place. While at dinner, I got a call from some other friends, and made plans to meet them later that night.
After dinner, I said goodbye to the group, and headed back to the apartment. I showered (was pretty nasty after sitting out in the sun all day!), changed, and went to meet my other friends at Ku'damm.
We were meeting up to go to the club Maxxim. There was supposed to be a fashion show that Sam was in, and we wanted to see her. Unfortunately as we got to the door of the club, the door guys said that it was "ladies night", i.e. no men allowed. We thought this was odd, as the website said that men could get in, but they just had to pay a little more. In any case, the guys couldn't get in, so we just hung around for a while until the show was over. I heard it was really good, but haven't seen any pics yet.
After that, we hung out for a few more hours, just talking and walking around. After a while, people were starting to get tired, so we headed our separate ways.
