JUST JAMMIN': Welcome to Berlin

Friday, December 27th, early morning. After few weeks of preparing, packing and excitement and after 17 hours on trains I was finally here. In Berlin. The city with a population of 3,5 million. That´s almost twice as many people as they live in Slovenia, my home country.

My host family collected me on a train station and while driving to their home I once again heard that sentence I heard many times in the past few weeks - "You must be very brave to come to foreign country without knowing the languege and without knowing any people here." But I think I´m just a bit crazy. And very curious :)


Berlin Hbf (central station)

This first week livig here passed by very quickly. Still, I already had time to see few cool places and meet some cool people. Since there are so many people, you never end up being alone. Even for New Year´s eve, which was just few days after my arriving, I had a company. I found a group of international people on MeetUp - this is a really great page for finding people with same interests and there is always something going on in some of those groups (I don´t think there´s any MeetUp groups in Slovenia, tho). I also had a chance to meet one of other Au Pairs here. And few days ago I went for a drink with some other english speaking people and I ended up partying till very late :) And it was during the week, but still lot of people everywhere, even at 2 a.m. That´s the charm of the big cities - always something happening, you can´t get bored so easily :)

Vogt´s BierExpress - one of cool places to hang out at the evenings

How do I explore Berlin? I don´t prefer tourists books/internet sites. I didn´t read any of them. Well, I´m lying actually - I did checked one of the books, but it´s not really a tourist guide. My host family bought me a welcome present, a book named 111 places in Berlin that you shouldn´t miss. There are some really intresting and not so well known places described in there and I definitely want to see some of them.
Well, I´ve been on the great wheel on Alexanderplatz - the famous attraction during the Christmas time. But that´s pretty much all of famous thing I saw so far.

Me infront of the wheel

View from the top of the wheel

But my way of exploring is to sit on the subway, take the random station and explore the surroundings.

Riding with subway (U-Bahn) here is pretty easy when you figure it out. Especially if you use this cool app called Berlin Subway, as I do :) Didn´t have any problems finding my way to where I was headed (or back home) so far.

Deutsche Oper subway station

Oh, and one of the experiences I had in my first days here - going to the store. Suddenly buying a simple thing that you bought a lot of times back at home became an adventure. You know exactlly how where the thing is placed at the store you usually go to and how the packing looks like. And then you come to foreign store and you have no idea what are you looking for. It took me 10 minutes to find the right cooking creame :) But the most exciting thing is buying supplies that are not so easy (or not even possible) to buy at your home country - like Milka with Smarties ;) Or strange looking fruit with strange names :)