A Renewed Love for Paris

Salut!!
I am back in Paris...finally! Haha. This weekend, Leslie and I traveled to Berlin!
We left Thursday night after class for the train station and took an overnight train from Paris to Berlin that took a little over 12 hours. We purchased our tickets for our seats a while ago, and I bought a seat for a couchette: a small bed. The couchette cabins have 6 beds in them: two hooked to the ceiling, two that fold out of the wall in the middle, and then the two on the bottom that are benches when the middle beds are folded away. Leslie bought a seat for one of these too, but then the trainline emailed her saying that they sold her a couchette that they didn't have. So they moved her to an actual seat. So for the first couple hours, I sat in her cabin (complete with 6 seats and 4 weird guys and a rather absent girl) with her until we decided to go to sleep. There was a father and son from Russia (I think) in 2 of the seats, an old french guy, another old french guy (with a toupe!!), and an asian girl who left and never came back. I sat in the girl's vacant chair for the first couple of hours of the train ride. We both started getting tired and I headed to my couchette. There was an empty bed, so I set my alarm for 1am and was going to go get Leslie if no one occupied it by then. I fell asleep and must have turned off my alarm while sleeping. I woke up at like 3:30 becuase the woman sleeping across from me kept "SSSHHHH"ing the guy snoring very loudly under me. Poor Leslie had to sleep in a chair all night (if she even slept that much!) And I slept relatively peacefully.
I got up at around 7 and went back into Leslie's cabin to await our arrival at Berlin. We finally got there around 9:30 Friday morning and proceeded to find our hostel! We picked this place called Pfefferbett. It was pretty nice! There was a pretty patio area, a huge lobby, very comfy beds, nice showers, and each guest had his/her own locker in the room. We couldn't check in until the afternoon, so we dropped off our backpacks and headed to the zoo!
The Berlin zoo is probabaly the best zoo I've ever been to! It was extremely huge! And I couldn't even tell that we were in the middle of a huge city!...(until we saw a Mercedez skyscraper haha). There were tons of animals, some I've never heard of. The fare was pretty cheap and it was a great time! Yes, I know it's strange that we went to Berlin and went to the zoo (which we could do in the states), but I'm glad we went becuase it was an awesome place! I got tons of pictures of animals (of which I didn't really put on my facebook becuase I figured everyone has seen giraffes and stuff before haha). Normally I don't usually absolutely love the zoo becuase I feel bad for the animals. But all of the animals at this zoo looked happy! I judged this by the crazy number of baby animals. There was a baby rhino, a baby elephant, baby hippos, baby wolves, baby monkeys, a baby kangaroo, baby deer, baby mountain sheep, and baby meerkats. The only bad part of the zoo was that I got a little sunburnt. I guess my spf 50 wore off and my spf 15 didn't really do much.
We went back to the hostel, checked in, showered and then hit the streets to explore the are around our hostel. It turns out that there isn't much around the section of Berlin we were in except grocery stores, some shady cafes, extremely expensive clothing stores, and a record store. After getting back to the hostel, we went to bed.
A list of things we did on Saturday!:
-went to the designer-stores-only mall and gawked at stuff that was waaay too expensive (for example: a coin purse for 300 euro!)
-went shopping at H&M (Europe's equivalent of Macy's I think)
-went on a 4 hour walking tour of the city and learned all about Berlin's past from the 1920s onward
We walked all over the city and saw things like Checkpoint Charlie, Hitler's bunker, the parliament building, the square where they had all those book burnings in WWII, the berlin wall (remnants obviously, haha), museum island, and the Bradenburg Gate.
-went back to the hostel to get ready to go to a techno club!
-tried to get to the techno club, but when we walked out of the train station into a scary, shady part of town, we turned back and went home
-went to bed
This morning, we got up early and went to the airport. We made it back to the Foyer not too long ago and it is a relief!! I'm glad I went to Germany, but I don't think I'll ever go back (at least not before I visit the other places on my i-want-to-visit list). The people were cool I guess, but I didn't see or do anything that I absolutely loved. Also, the language barrier was very intimidating. Basically everyone spoke English, but all of the signs, advertisements, etc were in German.
I would now like to give myself props becuase I totally navigated that crap out of Berlin! For not knowing anything in German (besides "do you speak german?" and "i love you"), I was able to get Leslie and I from the train station to the hostel, around the city, and from the hostel to the airport! I've never been so glad to have a semi-photographic memory and an ability to read maps correctly! Haha.
So yep, now I'm sitting at my fav desk in the library, looking at my beloved Eiffel Tower and doing homework.

Ich liebe dich!
Briana