look at you

Christmas Eve was here and it looked like we were going to have a white christmas but first we had some exploring to do. Matt (this is scott typing this post) had never really been to berlin besides a brief stop there in the past so he for sure had to check out the biggest standing section of the Berlin wall. We made our way over to the East Side Gallery to walk the 1000 meters of the wall that is still up with the one exception of the portion of the wall that was taken out and moved back and over to allow for people to make their way to the O2 arena... matt was happy to hear about the Berlin Ice Bears hockey team that plays in O2 and I think even snapped a few photos. O2 is a HUGE and kinda crazy. It was kinda cold and shane needed to stop into the bahn station to figure out some ticket stuff so we wandered around the station checking out a few of the shops and then decided it was time to grab some lunch as our stomachs were about to implode.

Due to the fact that like most of europe Berlin celebrates a good amount of the xmas season festivities on xmas eve not a whole lot was open but we did manage to find a burger place open and to be honest I was not quite sure how a burger would turn out over here but it was actually really good. I mean you cant really go wrong with some red meat topped with bacon...mmmm. Now that we were all fueled up and ready to brave the frigid temps and snow that berlin was throwing at us we hopped back onto the Ubahn to make our way to a part of Berlin that Shane had not really been to in an attempt to see the Stasi museum. The Stasi were basically the east german secret police and citizen spies. (for more information on the stasi please feel free to visit wikipedia ... we had wikishaneboyle). Like the Stasi the museum was a bit hard to find and I guess that makes sense due to the fact that the museum is where their old headquarters use to be. But sure enough like the luck we had in dublin ...it was close. Not due to weather but due to the fact it was xmas eve. This one we understood.

Now the sun was setting and once that happens it really gets cold so we decided to hit up a market to grab some food to make dinner which was schniztel with salad and spaetzle. Home made german meal thanks to Mr. Boyle. I will say it turned out pretty good and I think everyone was happy. This night shane and morgan had some friends that were from the states and the plan was to watch a christmas movie on the projector which was left by the person who shane and morgan are renting from. We decided on love actually and in the words of their friend chris...”it was AMAAAAZZZZIIINNNNGGG” which i think we all can agree with.

After the movie then morgan and chris called it a night which was actually not a bad call with it being about 12am... and Matt, Shane, Justine and I headed out to King Kong Klub to do some drinking and dancing. After putting on about 10 layers of clothes only to shed them all about 15 minutes later once we arrived at King kong we pulled up some couches grabbed some beers and did some hanging out we hit up the dance floor...it was suppose to be electro pop night but I dont know how they got that name with not knowing/having about ten songs we requested but the made up for it later on when we steered it into a new wave night with, the cure, depeche mode, new order, joy division and the smiths. It was good times and after a day of walking around, a night of dancing, a few drinks and the fact it was about 4 am we decided to head home so christmas morning would not become christmas afternoon. All in all...another good day/night on our trip.