Todavia en Berlin

Here is one more thing I did while in Berlin. After my friends left I still had two more days in Berlin. I had read about a cool Vietnamese restaurant on the internet and since you can't get any Vietnamese food in Barcelona I decided to go even though it was like a half hour tram ride. After waiting two hours to climb up inside the glass dome of the Reichstag I hopped onto the tram and started my journey. I was getting nervous because it seemed like i was venturing into the suburbs of Berlin but as I got closer to my stop I noticed a lot of asian people getting on the tram, VIETNAMESE people, I was like okay awesome this is good. At my stop everyone on the tram practically got off and I was getting so excited....then I was like but where are they going because they were all kind of just wandering through this gate into what looked like a giant parking lot. It actually was a giant parking lot but just beyond it were three giant warehouses!!

Here is a photo of warehouse 1, or Hall 1, to the left there were two more


So inside of each there is a small hallway and you will find Vietnamese everything, clothing stories, hair salons, nail salons, restaurants, groceries and even many fake flower shops.

Here is the inside


I picked a restaurant and asked what the lady would recommend to me but she spoke no english and i don't speak german so it was kind of pointless and then she just pointed to something and I said I'll have that, it was like a chicken and pepper dish it was so delicious in like a light sauce and then you can add this sauce that is slivered garlic and hot peppers, not sure if that is true but I thought it was garlic....

Then I went to another place where i saw them grilling meat and decided to go there too, they didn't speak any english either so asking for the meat that is grilling outside was kind of hard but somehow we managed, it was pretty good and came with some vermicelli noodles, lettuce and basil assortment and i think fish sauce.

After traveling a lot I have learned to kind of just watch what the other people do and then do the same, so i saw everyone eating this jelly, coconut milky, tapioca like thing with a spoon and decided to try it. There was like a 12 year old girl who helped me and after trying some terrible german with her she revealed her perfect english to me. It was incredible! She said something like, its jelly fruits with coconut milk would you like ice with it. crazy! and then she asked if i wanted to try it but i said no and just paid her and started eating. It was just kind of like jelly candies stuff with coconut milk but it was good, there were also kidney and lima beans in the bottom which kind of freaked me out.



If you're counting i ate two giant meals and that thing right in a row and then bought a steamed bun full of meat, hard boiled egg and cabbage for the road, it was actually my favorite thing. I never found the actual restaurant I was looking for though.

Tchuess!

Tchuess is kind of like cheers in German I guess, not for making toasts kind of cheers but like a "see ya" cheers. My trip to Germany was a great success, I was in Berlin for 7 days and Weimar for about 4 days.

This is currywurst, its a sausage, supposedly with curry in it? and then it has some ketchup curry sauce and then curry powder on top. It's very typical street food in Germany, it's so delicious. I think when I get back home I will probably make it.


This is inside the Treptower park flea market in Berlin. I'm not sure how we actually managed to find this place because it's really tucked away behind some fencing inside a bunch of warehouses, but we did! and it was really incredible as you can see. This is a fairly tame photo of some of the things we found.


Some booths were a little more extreme


Here is Kate, my friend I stayed with in Weimar. She is studying there at the Bauhaus University. Together we ate tons of ice cream and sausages and this photo was taken in the entrance to her friends apartment where they made us some curried vegetables.

Weimar is also home to Goethe and Schiller and some other writers, it has lots of libraries.

While in Berlin, Kate surprised me and was also there! We met up at this scavenger hunt. This is a photo of probably just half of our team, if that. Each team had a color, ours pink, and also a large speaker blasting electro music. Our team won! I think we may have only completed two tasks but we won anyways and I got a certificate.


Berlin was my first city outside of Spain to visit. It is incredibly different than Barcelona, the climate, the people, the food, the way the city is set up and there is so much street food whereas in Barcelona there is pretty much none. Berlin is a very interesting city because it has so much incredibly recent history. Walking around you can see buildings with bullet holes. It's also a very young city, I didn't see that many old people just lots of 20-30 year olds. I also found Vietnamese food, but that is for another post.