Euro04: Berlin + Prague

Jetlagged

Sunday, March 7th, 6:47AM

Looking out Brenna's apartment window.


So I went to Europe the second week of March 2004 to see Brenna and to just escape the United States for a few days. It had been a while since I had travelled outside of the US and I just needed to go wander around in a different part of the world for a while.

So.

This is the view out of the window from Brenna's bedroom, taken at about 6:45 in the morning. Since I hadn't slept on the flight over, I crashed out early (seven-or-eight-ish) and (thus) woke up, fully alert, at about five in the morning. I forgot to bring shampoo and soap, so I couldn't shower. And I didn't know the password to Brenna's computer, so I couldn't mindlessly browse the web or check e-mail. So I sat there, took a bunch of photos out of the window, and tried to identify (unsuccessfully) where we were on the Berlin map hanging on Brenna's wall. After about an hour of this I went to the dining room where Brenna slept on an air matress and woke her a bit so I could get what I needed to bathe.

Brenna lived on the eleventh floor of an old communist East Berlin apartment building right by the Greifswalder metro (S-Bahn) stop. The building had been remodelled sometime since the fall of the wall but still had some weird features such as an elevator that -- no matter what -- held it's doors open for a couple of minutes after you got in. The window looks southeast over a small park with a playground and a parking lot, across to a cluster of other apartment complexes. You can see the snow on the ground. It actually melted by a few hours later and then reappeared when it began to snow heavily later on in the day. It snowed intermittenly the entire time I was in Berlin, though it never got cold enough to accumulate for more than a few hours.