How we ticked currywursts off the list

Germans are strange. In a 'lets put a statue of a little boy peeing in our front yard' kind of way. At least it was a memorable landmark on our walk from the station to the concentration camp, and was the only thing that kept us from getting lost on the way back ("no we turn left at the giant strawberry, then left at the peeing boy...")

The concentration camp was a lot of things - educational, moving and definately worth the trip. Its difficult to write about without sounding either trite or flippant however it is something that neither of us will forget.

What we can share however is that Day 1 of the tour - the first meeting - went fine... we assume. Unfortunatlely we underestimated the time required to travel from the outskirts of outer-Berlin to the hostel at which we were meeting. Its ok mum, I sure we didn't miss anything. Kate and I were reprimmanded by way of a personal meeting with the tour guide after dinner, by which time a "tray" of beer (as our english-confused tour leader roughly translated to us) - buy 10 get 12- was already under our belts. We went to bed fairly tired from such a long day and very little sleep and with the best of intentions to be on time tomorrow.

'Oops', we said as we walked into the hostel lobby to find it empty. Our tour had left without us, but after a very very brisk walk we managed to catch them at the bus. Not the best of starts to the next 22 days as we have already become 'those people' - the ones that get lost, and keep everyone waiting. Time to be on our best behaviour! After a quick stop at a different section of the Berlin Wall, (we kept a close eye on the bus) we managed to get out first picture together!

We left the tour group after the Berlin drive-by and decided to do something cultural and visit a muesum. We cheated a little bit by going to the DDR museum -a fully interactive exhibition of life in the DDR. After riding Soviet tricycles and checking out the dioramas of people defying goverment policies by swiiming and playing beach volleyball nude at public beaches, we decided life is east Berlin looked fairly entertaining, if you were willing to cause some anarchy and rebel by wearing - shock horror - Levi jeans,

But now the best part of the day was to come. The part we had looked forward to from our first few moments in the city that is Berlin and the final tick on our check list of "must do's in Berlin". We hired bikes for the express purpose of visiting a well-recommeded currywurst stand.
Awesome :).
Ok so we actually rode around the city for quite awhile - ,almost 3 hours. We rode past all the main sites; through the Tier gardens, around the Reichstag building, through residental streets and funky shopping districts. Probably breaking quite a few road rules in process, but following the example of the locals who have no fear on the roads. In fact, we experienced more road rage from other bike riders than from the cars themselves. No Toto, we're not in Sydney anymore.

Then we ate our currywursts and our time in Berlin was complete. Well almost...

Another pub crawl was to be attempted. Yes, this time we managed not to be lead astray by family members and made it through to the final night club of the outing. We tried a few more of the almost 5,000 different German beirs with the company of our new friends on our last night before saying goodbye to Berlin and boarding the bus for Copenhagen!