July 23

I got an early start this morning for Berlin, which was a bit over 5 hours by train.  In Frankfurt I met the Pestels again, they were headed to Berlin for a pastor's conference; I knew that I might see them there from when we had talked on Sunday, but wasn't entirely certain if it was the same train or not.  The train ride went fine and I just listened to music to keep myself occupied, along with some needed sleep.  I arrived in Berlin, and found Joe and Marc waiting on the track for me.  We found trains that arrived within 15 minutes or so, and theirs arrived on the next track, so that worked out well.  Our hostel is right across the street from the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin, which is quite convenient, and there really aren't that many train sounds either.  We checked in and just had to wait a little while for our room to be cleaned.  After dropping off some stuff, we visited the Berlin Zoo, which is really quite expansive.  Highlights were the polar bears, panda bear and most all of the monkeys we saw, because monkeys are hilarious.  Apparently we had perfect timing as well, because essentially all of the animals were being fed when we walked past, and we even got to see the lions and big cats get fed.  After the zoo we went to a church that had been partially destroyed by bombing, and had been left as it was.  We were even able to find the Ka De We (Ka Day Vay), which is maybe the third largest shopping center in the world.  It was kind of ridiculous to see all of the stuff that was for sale there.  There are six floors with merchants, and the seventh is a wine garden with a pretty nice view of that part of Berlin.  After looking at a few price tags I soon realized that it was a place that I would probably never shop at; it was however very cool to walk through and gawk at.  We stopped for some sandwiches afterwards and watched what was either a protest, or street performers.  The Lego and Nike stores were on the way back as well, so we briefly stopped in them to look around.  At Lego, there was a lifesized Lego Woody from Toy Story, which was incredible and cool.  Apparently today Dirk Nowitzky had stopped by the Nike store, because there was a star in the pavement in front, with his signature and today's date!  Even crazier though, was that a few minutes after we left the Nike store, we ran into part of the group that is studying here in Berlin‼  We talked for a bit and heard how things had been going for them so far.  I guess they have three hours of German class per day, and three hours of Engineering 202 per day.  Apparently the German class doesn't have much homework assigned, but that is still a lot of class to do every day (or maybe it is just 4 days per week, I don't remember).  After coming across them, we went back to the hostel and met our other roommate.  His name is Alex and he is from Edmonton, Canada.  He took a year off from school and has been traveling in Asia since September.  He now has one more year left just like us.  Kind of an interesting character, but quite cool and very laid back.