Berlin

June 2, 2007

Berlin, Germany

Now I am really all alone. After gradually adjusting to life after following a human herd everywhere, I am finally a free person, able to wake up when I want, sleep when I want and go and do whatever I want. But it’s a strange feeling. I walk the streets and whenever I think of something funny to say, the only thing I can do is try to remember it so I can put it into a blog or an email. But there is no immediate gratification of being able to say it directly to someone else and get their input, and the only people I talk to are those who are helping me to navigate Berlin itself or those who I share rooms with at the hostel.

I was initially very intimidated at the thought of sharing my bedroom with a bunch of strangers, but it is actually turning out much better than I expected. Generally, the folks here are very friendly and nice and the hostel is clean. I am located in the edge of the Grunewald forest, which is in the far southwestern corner of Berlin, off of most of the maps. I have to walk through the woods to take a bus to be in the heart of the city. On the plus side, the location makes the place very quiet at night and the forest offers good running trails. But it also means a one hour commute which means that when I leave for the day I often do not return until dinnertime. Or even past it.

That first morning I woke up brutally early, and caught the bus to the airport in Thesaloniki, where I luckily did not have too long to wait before boarding the plane and falling asleep, as yet unrecovered from my late night with Elena in Xanthi. I woke up not long before we touched down in Berlin.

It was a long process to reach the hostel. The airport was confusing, and I went up and down several flights of stairs before I finally reached the bus depot, and made it just in time to grab the X9 bus from the Berlin Tegel airport into the city. The hostel had generously provided for me a list of directions that would take me to them, but I messed up on the first direction, failing to get off the bus and onto the metro at the proper time. So when I was finally dropped off at Zoo Station, I was understandably a little upset. I had no idea where I was supposed to sleep that night, and furthermore, I could not for the life of me think of how to get there. Soon enough, however, I remembered that I had copied another set of directions off of the hostel’s website, which would bring me through multiple bus changes to the place I desired.

So I set out, stuffing my bags onto the much-too-small space of the bus, and settling in for a long ride. I watched buildings and people whiz by, and soon I was entering what looked like the posh shopping district of the city—Louis Vuitton, Valentino, and others graced the sidewalk with their shiny high fashion clothes. I don’t think I had ever seen so many nice stores on one street since I had been at the Spanish Steps in Rome. Then, after a while, the neighborhood turned more residential, the shops fading into restaurants and into quiet but well maintained streets, with wide boulevards and trees. I was impressed—if this was where my hostel was located I was sure to have a good time. I got off of the bus at one stop and had to change busses, and I did a little bit of wandering to find the correct stop—sometimes there are several at one intersection. So I went into a bank and wrote down the name of the bus line on a sheet of paper. Luckily the woman spoke enough English to point me in the right direction.

And after another short bus ride I was off, on Pulkestrasser, another shady residential boulevard with a wide variety of architectrure, ranging from a highly industrial looking house with portholes on the slanting upper level, to an updated looking 2 story neoclassical. I walked with my bags as the numbers went up and up—I was looking for 54 Pulkerstrasser, and right at 52, the road dead ended into a forest. Then, back among the trees I saw a sign saying “JetPack Hostel”, and an arrow that pointed off to the left. I thought to myself “you have got to be kidding me—I am looking for a hostel in Berlin and the sign is taking me into the forest?!?”

It turns out that I was in the Grunewald forest, a 745 acre expanse to the southwest of the city. The hostel turned out to look more like a lodge than anything else—set up on a wide lawn with a variety of games in the back yard. The woman who showed me around was very nice, and the rooms, while sparse, were clean—they looked more like the housing of a sleep-away camp than anything else. I grabbed a bunk and got some sheets and took a short nap.

But, I could not fall asleep—the sudden absence of any true privacy was making me tune into every single sound in the hostel—people walking the halls, doors opening and closing, and the blare of the TV in the distance. So I gave up on sleep and asked about the quickest way into the city, taking a 10 minute walk in another direction through the woods and to a station where I could pick up the X10 bus down to the Zoo where I started my journey. I had a lot of things to do—in addition to seeing Berlin, I had to buy a bus pass, I had to go to the bank, find some food somewhere, and eventually book the rest of my trip. I had not done much planning since I had worked out my Greece itinerary, and it was time to book some more places to sleep.

I arrived into the noise and confusion of the Zoo—busses coming and going, people wandering about, and cars flitting by. However, this was a much more organized type of confustion than any other city I had been in before. The streets were wide and well paved, there were lighted signs and directions plastered everywhere, and above all, everything in this part of Berlin seemed so thoroughly modern. All around me rose high buildings faced in continuous walls of solid glass. I turned in a slow circle surveying the area before moving forward—first things first, I had to find a bank, which I did very quickly. Some parts of this city seem to have banks on just about every corner. Then it was to the information station at the huge intersection of bus, U-bahn and S-bahn lines at the Zoo—a small kiosk was set out in the bus lines where visitors could get maps and tickets. I had read in my Let’s Go Germany book that buying 48 or 72 hour passes was much cheaper than trying to buy individual tickets, so I went and set myself up with one. Then I happened to catch a glimpse of a sign across the street, stating loud and clear that it sold discounted theater tickets.

I had heard that Berlin was one of the entertainment capitals of the world, and not having a huge chance to see the nightlife of many of the other cities, I was eager to try to get my hands on a theater or concert ticket. I saw a sign for Blue Man Group, but even the half price tickets ran around 45 euro, which was more than I wanted to spend. I went up to the desk and asked the woman about some of the shows, and immediately knowing that I spoke no German she directed me to some shows that I could understand—a Disney adaptation and a show filled with various music imitators—anyone from Elton John to Tina Turner to Elvis was featured. I knew that it was kitchy, but at this point on the trip I was starting to miss anything American, so I bought my tickets for the show, which was located all of the way across town at a big hotel near Sonnenallee.

That task finished, I set about sightseeing. I took a big wandering loop out of the Zoological Garten, making my way toward one of the few old looking buildings on this block of shiny concrete and glass. It was called Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche—otherwise known as the “hollow tooth,” an 1895 church which had been blasted out in WW II and left in that state. It made a striking contrast to the other smooth-faced buildings that surrounded it-- a stone statue encrusted building left open to the sky. The points of the church were left shattered into pieces, and where a large rose window used to be gaped a dark maw. It looked like it could belong in a dystopian novel along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World, a relic of a past civilization, destroyed by war. Luckily the healthy sheen of the rest of the buildings kept that image from completely overwhelming my perception of the place. The outside of the hollow tooth was surrounded by a variety of fruit and doner vendors, with brightly striped umbrellas over their little stands.

Inside, the building was still full of a glitter of mosaics, cracked with the force of the explosion that blasted out the windows, which were only screened over and left largely open to the sky. The church was completely hollowed out—only the decoration on the walls still remained, and in its place were a bunch of photographs that showed Berlin during and after the time of the bombing—blasted out homes and partiallyshattered buildings. It looked in my mind very similar to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum that we had seen so many months ago in Italy, but of course this damage was at the hands of man, not of natural disaster.

Then I kept walking, up to the northeast part of the city where I had seen a place marked on my map of the Deutche Oper. I continued up the wide streets, marveling at how clean and orderly they seemed in comparison to the cramped and crowded quarters of cities like Athens and Rome. I came to a huge intersection where the cars whirled about a big green roundabout in the center, and, suddenly realizing that I was quite hungry after my very early morning, long scramble through the metro, and walk across part of Berlin, I stopped at a cheap looking restaurant that advertised hamburgers and the like. I had a German version of a hamburger there; a slice of ham on a huge role supplemented by French fries and a small salad. It was delicious, especially considering that I had not eaten anything significant since very early that morning. I took out the map I had been given with the metro ticket I had gotten, and took out my book, highlighting and circling the things I wanted to see for my stay there. It was a lot. But it looked like all of the things I wanted to see were clustered around a few major areas—Musuem Insel, which contained a number of museums, the Tiergarten and the Reichstag, and then over in eastern Berlin were the remains of the wall and the Jewish Museum, designed by the famous Architect Daniel Libeskind. But with everything closed or closing at that point in the afternoon, I was content simply to walk around and see what I wanted to see.

Berlin struck me as an immensely modern city. I had not seen any of the more historic monuments yet, with the exception of the broken tooth, and here most of the buildings were imposing steel and glass structures, and the streets were wide with huge sidewalks. This was one huge difference between Berlin and anywhere else—I could walk along the streets without feeling like I was risking being hit by traffic. And, there were special areas on the sidewalk designated for bicycle traffic (not motorcycles, which dominated the cities in Greece and Italy) in red colored bricks that allowed for the separation of pedestrians and other forms of traffic. All in all, it felt very German—efficient, clean, and highly organized.

After a while, I came to the Deutche Oper, a massive cement building balancing precariously on an impossibly small, recessed base painted black. It looked like a science experiment where one had to balance a brick upon eggshells—the huge mass of the upper portion of the building dominated, making it look as if any minute it might squish the smaller supporting area underneath. The ground floor was covered along the front wall with movie posters and the like, but nothing looked as if it was playing during my short stay in the city.

So, I continued on my way, up and around the city streets for a bit, before hopping on the nearest metro and journeying all of the way across town, to Sonnenalle. I was now in eastern Berlin, and the metro quickly moved from being underground to an above ground track, and I had to change several times, emerging to turn of the century looking platforms complete with brick and wrought iron. Most of the area I saw in eastern Berlin looked like this—far more old world seeming, with narrower streets and heavier use of brick. Even the streets were cobblestoned in places. The housing apartments rose in stocky blocks, small windowed and textured by their concrete or block construction, which struck me as much more similar to the housing developments I had seen in Athens and in Greece than in anything in the western side of Berlin, which was dominated either by steel and glass, or even farther west and south to tree lined family homes.

I was going to see “Stars in Concert” at a huge hotel in the area, and I quickly spotted it because it rose high above any of the other complexes close by. It looked brand new, with lobbies that contained minimalist furniture and a multitude of levels to accommodate bars, coffee shops, and piano lounges. I felt like I had stepped out of my normal world of hostels and cheap hotels into an entirely different world. The women were dressed in slightly overdone outfits, and the men strutted about and smoked cigars and ordered overpriced drinks from the hotel staff. It really was like stepping into a casino or a resort, and I felt like an intruder with my practical walking shoes and bag. Nevertheless, I had some time before the show was supposed to start, so I settled myself into one of the simple orange chairs and ordered coffee—one of the cheapest items on the menu. I sat and watched the people, mostly middle aged couples and sometimes their children, which looked entirely bored with the whole affair, walk around and waste time until the show started.

When it neared 8, I walked through the doors leading to the concert area, and was surprised to find myself entering a large room set up with a series of small tables lit by glowing candles and graced with a wine decanter. The walls were black, and in the front was a small stage with a piano and some drum equipment. I had expected more of a theater type experience, but this was more along the lines of a lounge than anything else.

And the show began. It was cheesy, but very entertaining. Some of the “artists” were before my time, so I only recognized some of the songs, but everyone seemed to have fun. It was just so funny to be sitting there, in the middle of Berlin, at a show that wanted to imitate Las Vegas, which was itself an amalgam of all of the best parts of other cities, a place completely based upon the manufacture of spectacle. So this show was twice removed from the reality of the original artists—first through Berlin, and then through Las Vegas. Everything was mediated by stereotypes and images—the Elton John impersonator wore loud outfits and banged on the piano keys, while behind him on either side video of the real Elton John was synced with the song. But neither was the actual Elton himself—one was a live impersonator, and the other was a video reproduction several years old. This was a study in strategic inauthenticity if I ever saw one, and while I did enjoy myself, I thought it was strange that for me and for members of the younger generations not as familiar with these classic artists that my first introduction to them would be through the double-blind of the Berlin-Vegas Stars in Concert. But this was my reality, constructed by false images. I had never seen the real Elvis, and indeed had only heard some of his songs, so when I saw the gyrating hips of the man on stage and compared it to the grainy video of Elvis behind him I found a faithful imitation. But perhaps to someone who had seen the real Elvis it would be different. The aura would be gone.

But perhaps that’s the anthropologist in me speaking. Half of the time in the concert I was thinking about my image-constructed false reality. Soundbytes from Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and pieces from other theorists dealing with our media saturated world kept filtering through my head. One guy named Appadurai (if I am remembering this right) wrote that South Pacific Islanders in some instances were more faithful to American 1950s music than we were in the US. In that same vein, is this music more faithful to the original? Does the imitation of an already false reality make this production more real? In other words, was it easier to imitate Las Vegas, than something less media and imitation based?

Anyway, the show was fun, and at the end of it, all of the “artists”, which included Elton John, Elvis, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, and ABBA came on stage to sing a Beatles song, to which everyone stood up and clapped and sang as they exited. We were released back to reality, and I walked back to the subway to make my way back home.

I was on the train when a young man approached me and asked me where I was going. I had been studying the metro map quite intently, and I think he wanted to help. Pretty soon we had struck up a conversation in the flying darkness underground, and he invited me to stop at the next station and grab a beer. So I did.

His name was something unpronounceable, and he was originally from Turkey but had moved to Berlin and was enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute. I found out that he studied computers and mathematics and had also lived in Barcelona and was planning on going to Chicago for a while. Truly a world citizen. However, his English was limited, and a good deal of the conversation took place by scribbling images on the coaster we had in front of us, and a lot of pointing and gesturing. We ordered some of the local beer, which I surprised myself by actually liking (generally I don’t like beer), and passed a few hours telling broken stories and laughing at the confusion when sometimes the message did not get across quite correctly.

But by around midnight, I was practically snoozing over my beer—the long day of travel was catching up with me, and I realized that I needed to get back to the hostel with out any more attention than I had gotten. So this guy escorted me onto the metro, and when we stopped at the Zoo, I quickly hopped on the bus to take me home. Much to his disappointment and confusion I am sure, because although I had a good time and for him the night was young (as it always seems to be in Europe) I really just wanted to sleep.

I got off at the stop to find the streets at night completely foreign to how I had remembered. After wandering up and down the streets for a while, I finally gave up and hailed a taxi, which took all of 2 minutes to take me to the right street. I think I actually ended up paying more for the initial meter price than the distance that he drove. But at last, I was home, and walked the short walk through the woods, and being quiet not to disturb my as-yet-unknown roommates, I slept.

Today was another busy day. I woke up still in all of my clothes from the previous night, having been too tired to turn on the lights and dig around in my suitcase, and awoke to the shuffling of clothing and sheets as my fellow sleepers were getting up for the day. I saw two people, a couple or friends, who spoke rapidly in a language I did not understand and simply nodded when I said goodmorning. I headed down to breakfast and made a hasty introduction before setting out for the day.

I was on a mission to find the Olympic Stadium, which was fairly easily accessible via metro. Unfortunately for me it was a Saturday and the express bus which had aided me on the previous day was not working, and I realized just when I got to the stop and bus after bus with out the name X10 plastered on the front came and left that I probably needed to find another ride into the city. So I looked on the bus schedules to find a bus line that intersected with an S-bahn or a U-bahn and got on that one, extending my commute from 30 mintues to an hour. I got out and changed at Zoo station, taking the line all of the way out to Olympiastadion, emerging in the grey morning mist.

The complex was immense, and lacked all manner of openness that Calatrava’s contained. This complex was concerned solely with monumentality, and I could see it everywhere, in the high, imposing walls and the huge monolithic towers that blocked out parts of the sky overhead. The entire thing was arranged along two major axes: the first led from the S bahn which I had taken to arrive at the stadium, and from there the trees and sidewalk formed a promenade that ended straight at the arena. From my location facing the stadium, off to the left I could see the other major axis of the place, and this one was undoubtably bigger, judging by the way the huge towers and the grand entrance to the stadium faced this way. It also opened up to the U-bahn—the other access to the space.

Everywhere here things were done in strict linearity. Unlike Calatrava’s Olympic complex, which swelled and curved, delighting in the contrast between its organic forms and the boxy forms around it, this stadium complex seemed to want to constrict the organic as much as possible, dividing everything into an orthagonality. The stadium itself resembled the coliseum in many ways—several tiers of columns marching around the exterior, all done up in a somber dark stone. I could not see a bigger contrast between the flamboyant exuberance of the curves that graced the top of Calatrava’s roof. Here, the stadium ended simply and abruptly at the last row of columns, and the roof that was added later did not interrupt the orthogonal nature of the whole construction.

I walked around the exterior, moving in a clockwise direction, to see if there was any place where I could actually get inside of the building and see how it worked. I passed a Jesse Owens allee, a name change to compensate for Hitler’s poor treatment of the man after he won an indordinate number of gold medals in the 1936 Olympics. Continuing on, I passed an arena for use in horseracing; apparently it was one of the first structures on the site, and through the gate I could see the rooftops of stables and what looked like horse trailers. Then I kept going, until I came ¼ of the way around the arena, and I was standing on the primary axis of the site. Here, in one direction a wide road faded off into the distance, and in the other, a highly regular building confronted me, and standing in the direct center of this low colonnaded building was a huge tower, one which I had seen upon first viewing the stadium complex, but had never seen up close. The whole thing was made up of the same dark flat stone, and on the other side of the building I could see a massive field stretching in the opposite direction, terminating where the stadium itself began.

It turns out that this was the museum. I walked up to and through the columns before paying for my ticket and entering the galleries, where I learned the history of the site, its construction and its use. The current building was built over an earlier facility by Hitler in preparations for the 1936 Olympic Games. In the process the whole site was monumentalized and enlarged, with the addition of a swimming complex, and the huge towers that accented the primary axis of the site. The stadium was originally open air, and could seat some 70,000 spectators, and was later modified that it could hold close to 100,000. Significantly, it was also heavily used for Nazi party rallies: the combination of civic duty, military strength, and athletic spectale was something that Hitler himself promoted. I found it particularly interesting that in his mind the strength of the state was correlated strongly with a strong, healthy body, and the sporting events and other demonstrations that took place here served to link these two aspects in the minds of the German people.

I also found some information on a German “gymnastics movement,” which predated the construction of the stadium but also pointed to a link between national identity and athletics. Hitler would take this idea and turn it to his own ends, promoting “fitness” of the superior german people through athletic events and spectacle that would showcase their prowess. Naturally, he was a little bit upset to find later when he hosted the Olympics that Jesse Owens, a black man, would be one of the most highly accomplished athletes at the games, and some stories say that he refused to award him anything. The enumeration of a Jesse Owens allee around the stadium complex now is an effort to rectify the situation. All of this supports some of the ideas that are floating around for my thesi—the links between athletics and identity, the reinforcement of certain social values through spectacle, and the associations of these values with the symbol of the stadium complex itself.

The stadium complex was taken over by the Americans and the British during their occupation of Germany in WWII, and they used it in similar ways, hosting their own party rallies and demonstrations.

However, it was largely left untouched until 1974 when it gained a new roof and some renovations due to the hosting of the FIFA World Cup. In 2000-2004 it was modified again to accommodate some of the requirements of modern sports—skyboxes were added in the division between the lower level of seats and the upper level, and a new roof was added, bringing the seating capacity back down to about 74,000. A track was added around the interior, painted an uncharacteristic blue color in part, I think, to divorce it from the shadows of its bright red Nazi origins. It hosted the World Cup in 2006, an event which many believe has finally allowed it to step out of its past and firmly into the present. The continuing use of the stadium is interesting to me for a few reasons—the fact that it was such a symbol for the Nazi party makes it a curious choice for continued use. Was it just too expensive to tear down? Or perhaps this is a perfect example of the ability of symbols to change their meanings over time, and the physical additions to the space make it a bit different than it was in its original 1936 incarnation.

Lots of stuff to think about at least!

So after seeing the exhibit I took the elevator up to the high tower, from which I could see the parade grounds and the stadium close to me, with another set of towers flanking the complex on the other side. There were four in total, grouped in pairs and set flanking the massive entrance to the stadium from the U-bahn entrance. Between each pair was hung a gigantic set of Olympic rings. Farther in the distance I could see the surrounding complex ranging about—training grounds with soccer fields, the pool, and forest stretching off to where the taller buildings of the Berlin skyline poked their heads skywards. Although I could not identify very many by name at the time, I am sure that some of them probably included the giant radio tower close to Alexanderplatz and the Reichstag.

The view was amazing. I stood with my mouth hanging open for quite a while, taking it all in. I could even see some activity going on inside of the stadium itself—a big screen TV was visible opposite the arena from my vantage point, and I could see colors and shapes flickering across it as it appeared that some kind of screen test was taking place. Curious, I exited the museum and walked all of the way around to the opposite side of the stadium complex to the U bahn entrance. I ran into a huge amount of noise and loud music—there was some sort of festival going on with food stands and a band and a number of other activities. I went over to the information booth and asked about what was going on, and they told me that there was a football game that day. “Football?” I asked, “you mean American Football?!?!?”

It turns out that there is an NFLeuropa league, which contains quite a few German teams, among them the Berlin Thunder and the Frankfurt Galaxy, who happened to be playing each other later that day, in the Olympic Complex. Naturally, I had to get a ticket. I did a bit more wandering around the festival area, which I could see now was plastered with the same signs I had seen in the metro—glossy pictures of football players and cheerleaders with the brazen heading “The Hometown of Touchdown.” I wanted to see other things before returning, so I walked down this avenue of tents before I jumped on the U-bahn and headed over to another part of Berlin.

This area was rather close to the stadium, and I got off at the station and took a long walk down a tree lined street to reach the Schloss Charlottenburg, a turn of the century palace which had immaculately manicured gardens and two huge museums, one that contained ancient Egyptian works and another dedicated to Picasso and his contemporaries. But by the time I reached the place, I got hit with a wave of exhaustion so heavy I decided to scrap the whole thing and go back to the hostel for a nap and some rest. I wandered around the outside of the grounds and then walked back to the metro, for the long ride home. I almost fell asleep on the way.

After my nap, I woke up quite a bit more refreshed and had just enough time to throw on a warmer set of clothing (Berlin gets quite cool in the evening, and after so long in a Mediterranean climate its hard to get used to) before walking to the bus stop and taking another hour long commute over to the Olympic Stadium.

It was not as busy as I expected—I saw a few people milling about and the last vestiges of the festival getting packed up. I walked through the entrance gate and game up close to the arena itself, even more imposing up close than far away, where the dark stone meets in rigid lines overhead. I took a wide set of stairs up to the second level, up to the nosebleed section where my seats were located, and got settled.

The arena was less than half filled, but the fans were very enthusiastic. They did many of the same things I had witnessed at the soccer game so long ago, but there were some differences, which included:

 A mixture of German and English over the loudspeaker. The officials looked and sounded like native English speakers, and all of the play calls were made in English, while the announcer spoke German.

 Chants included some songs, but by and large they included cheers that reacted directly to the events of the game, instead of going on in a continuous fashion. I think this may have been due more to the stop-and-start nature of football itself than anything else.

 Music was a constant feature, played every time the play on the field stopped. I know from being at pro basketball games that the same things happens there, and I wonder if it is a feature of the professional leagues. Never having been to a pro football game in the states, though, its hard to say whether this is a pro thing or a NFL europa thing. And, the music was mostly American pop music

 Cheerleaders were present, and they would lead some of the chanting, and would always dance between the plays in the game.

 As before, noisemakers and flags were a big presence, and lots of spectators wore jerseys and other paraphernalia.

Everything that I think of as standard football stuff was present—Cheerleaders with big hair and small outfits, a blaring announcer, a huge TV which replayed events over and over again, and even the stands-vendors, who in this instance sold huge pretzels instead of popcorn or whatever they sell in the states. It was just funny to see it in a European setting, where the spectators used whistles and songs just as enthusiastically as the regular cheering, and the announcer would shout “I can’t hear you BERLIN!!” At one point, I even heard the dreaded noise of the Seminole chant-and-chop, which left me all but frozen in my seat. I realized again there just how many meanings can be attached to a symbol like that. For me, the sequence of sounds and the chopping motion brought back memories of a particular Gator football game which I had attended in which we were badly beaten, at home, by FSU. But I am sure that none of the Berliners had anything remotely close to war paint and feathers in their minds when they started singing “aaaahhh-ahhhh-aaah, uhhhh, uhhh, uhhhh.” But I certainly did.

When the game ended, I was getting rather cold, so I walked briskly out with the stream of people and took a long ride back to the hostel. There, I found roommates I had barely seen in the past few days and began some conversations with them. The twosome I had seen earlier were from Veinna and the Netherlands, respectively, and they had been studying in Sweden and were on their way home for summer holiday. The other guy that was rooming with me was from Brazil, and was in Berlin for some kind of science conference. We all hung out in the common room for several hours and traded stories, and I showed them pictures on my computer from all of the places I had been. The one from Vienna, a blond guy named Stefan, was particulary interested in Egypt. He said that he wanted to go there soon, and afterward started to convince me to visit him in Vienna instead of going to Switzerland. He said it was much better than anything I would find there, and I told him that I had already bought my rail ticket. He looked disappointed, but he and I exchanged email addresses and I agreed to let him know if I was going to change my mind and see Austria instead. I agreed.

The woman named Jane was also studying and traveling, and she seemed more content to sit and watch the movie which blared in the background. Staying in these hostels is really like being on a freshman dorm—we share bathrooms, and everyone is new. As a result, I stayed up way later than I would have liked just talking to my roommates about what they had seen and what they wanted to see in Europe, comparing notes and stories. I went to bed tired but happy. The hostelling was working out much better than I expected.