first full day in Berlin - SO MUCH walking (136/365b)

hot water was off in the morning, and nina fixed it all by herself.

nina convinced me to take a photo of these guys, while i made an utter fool of myself trying to pretend like i was taking a picture of something else. of course they were so drunk at 9am that they wouldn't have noticed me taking their picture even if i had asked them point blank.

let's have a party in the middle of the street

speaking of 9am... when we went to get coffee we couldn't find anything in the area open before 9am. and when we got to the closest one that opened at 9, the owner of the shop hadn't put the tables outside yet, and she asked us to give her a minute, because she wasn't quite ready to make a coffee yet.

walking is really by far the best way to explore any city. so walk we did. hours and hours and hours, no ubahn for even a stop. i was walking barefoot, with fancy shoes just in case we wanted to go inside somewhere fancy. but lucky me finally became the owner of a pair of birkenstocks, and then a proud owner of some extremely angry blisters. who breaks in a pair of shoes by walking a new city? #onlyirma

found while walking:

holocaust memorial, a study of greys

construction site, a kind of before and after

we walked around a lot of sites and did a lot! alexanderplatz to checkpoint charlie and back, by way of the brandenburg tor and a lot of people watching.
we found a vegan food festival, full of fried food carts, and they even had a vegan sausage workshop, which was so funny to watch.
the festival was in the shadow of the tourist symbol the tv tower, and also of a mega hotel advertising a 40thfloor view of the city with a rooftop lounge. so we chose the latter with the hope of a pre-dinner glass of something. by the top we were partched and dehydrated by a mixture of sun/wind/walking around all day and the price of a soft drink was higher than some good bottles of wine and served without love.

irma photographing the sites from above

so .... i asked where i could refill my water bottle... on the 2nd floor, 5 floors down the stairs, 34 floors down the elevator, no problem, through the doors marked WC to a very nice hotel bathroom, which when i got out of back to the double doors, they were locked. a guy from wisconsin also came out of the bathroom and started banging on the door with me. what were we going to do now? he knew a different elevator on the side we were on, and he wanted to go back to the bar, so he went down a floor, i went up 35 floors, got out, went into the stairwell, up 5 floors, LOCKED. I banged on the door there and a hotel worker poked his head out, sorry, you have to come up the other side. OK, i said, how do i get there? you have to walk down to the main desk. 40 floors down in a locked stairwell. OK fine, so i did, went up the correct elevator, up the next 5 floors, and phew, finally got some water. is this an #onlyirma story? i think so. 

and we found dinner and ice cream with tira and patrick, who were nice enough to suggest a place. typical berlin style you walk these very unwelcoming looking streets, turn a nondescript corner and find a block booming and bustling with restaurants and people.

choosing ice cream
don't know what's up with the red cast
but i liked it
so i didn't edit it away

since it was only an hour and 40 minute walk back to our airbnb we walked it. when a security guard didn't let us cut off a half a km by walking through his parking lot a mile from home we started feeling a bit annoyed with the decision. and when we got back we were first kind to our poor feet and then we were asleep instantly.