I say "Aaahhh, Berlin!"

What a better way to celebrate the fall in Europe than a road trip to Berlin? Well, a cruise to the Mediterranean comes to mind, skiing in the Alps, and/or moving to the Caribbean come to mind, but a trip to Berlin was all that was organized by one of the student groups here in Bruxelles, so I packed my bags and left on a bus on Friday evening.

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Unfortunately, someone neglected to tell me that Berlin is rather further than it appears on the map, and so, 12 hours later, I arrived in a city that I fondly nicknamed "No, really, it's right next to Poland" (I'm lying, it wasn't all the fondly). At least I had a great group of people with me. Whereas many people go on exchange to meet people from different cultures and see strange new sights, I have gone on exchange to hang out with a bunch of Quebecois to drink beer and occasionally, cheap wine. Not that I'm complaining.

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Anyway, our small group of 40 students descended on the Reichstag on one rainy day, and waited for two hours in the rain to see a panorama of the city. Frankly, I was a little disappointed. I was hoping that there would be a tour of the Reichtag, maybe some discussion of its history. Instead, we got a view of a drizzly rather plain city. Afterwards, we wandered around the city for several hours, not so much sightseeing as trying to find the checkpoint Charlie museum. The museum itself was definitely worth the wait. It has expanded from a museum of memorabilia of the Berlin War, through art associated with the Wall to exhibitions on political movements resisting the Iron Curtain in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

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That night, we went to a club at the Postdammerplatz, the so-called hottest techno club in Western Europe. I don't really enjoy techno, but I danced anyway. The club used to be the sight of a XIXth century bank, and if you consider that an unlikely location for a club, you should realize that the club was in the basement of the old bank, where the stone walls lent the club a suitably grim and gritty atmosphere, and the club had preserved the vaults of the bank, with the dancing taken place behind ancient iron bars. Overall, the effect was more dungeonesque than anything else.

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The next day, exasperated with the slow pace of sightseeing, four of us struck out on our own: Adrian, Amelie, Emilie and me. That morning we did a walking tour of the Third Reich, which was completely worthwhile, and in the afternoon we went to the Pergamon museum as well as doing a fair amount of city sight-seeing. We had dinner separately, and started the long bus ride back to Brussels.

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Note: The Belgian students here tend to take frosh week to extremes. I has currently been going on for a month, and the plan is for it to continue until mid-November. This of course means that as a general course, the students are always drunk. This was highlighted when we were going to the club on Saturday. Of the 40 of us, about 30 had decided to go to the club. On the walk to the metro station, we lost about 7 or 8 students, who were too drunk to continue and stopped for a break at the MacDonald's we passed. A further 7 were left on the metro platform when the leader of the group (who was as drunk as the rest) decided to play "run-and-jump-into-the-metro-just-before-the-door-closes-and-hope-it-goes-to-the-right-station". Our remaining group of 16 lost another two students who failed to get off the metro at the correct stop. By the time I had my first beer, at the café we stopped at before going to the club, we were down to 14 students. And by the time we got to the club, we had lost another two, who, quite understandably, felt that 1h00 was a bit late to be arriving at a club, especially when none of us had slept the night before.