If you have spent any time around me, you know that I traveled to Germany in January of 2018 for a month. I quite literally never stop talking about it and some of the most common phrases are: "Did you know I spent a month in Germany?" and
"I love Germany"
Needless to say, I loved every moment I spent in Germany and definitely made some memories that will 110% last a lifetime. Although some of them did not feel super great at the time.
One of the four weeks I was in Germany was spent in Berlin. And, honestly, I may have found my soul city. The food. The museums. The drinks. The clubs.
You may be thinking: "Ella, you are a child. How did you get into a club?" Well, in case you didn't know the legal drinking age for beer and wine starts at 18 and everything else at 18. And if you do some quick maths I was 19 during my time in Germany. So, I was legal.
Honestly, I didn't really think about the clubs when I heard we were going to Berlin. I've never paid much attention to night life in general because:
(a) I'm underage in the US
(b) I'm a grandma
So that being said, I did not go to Germany to seek out the time of my life in clubs around Germany. But, once some friends found out I'd be going to Germany the clubbing scene entered my radar, but it was still not a priority. That is, until we got to Berlin and quickly learned that it has some of the best clubs in the world (according to the people we talked to in Germany, FYI). And as legal American college students we, we being the girls I spent the majority of the trip with, decided that we had to go out at least one night in Berlin.
So, naturally, we chose the last night we were in Berlin and the night before a 6 am wake-up call. The logic was flawed, I will admit that, but go we did. We didn't quite make it to the club we intended to go to. Why, you may ask? We met some Spaniards on the train ride over to the club and followed them to a different club. As you can tell, the logic was not exactly the highlight of the night. But we ended up at a club having a confetti party, which was very fun. We stayed for a few hours and headed out early. And just so you know, early for clubs in Berlin is 2 in the morning. So we went back to the train station and got on the right train. Or so we thought. Although we got the train number right, we got the direction wrong. And we didn't realize until it was too late and we were standing on an outdoor train platform realizing that the train schedule thins out as the night gets later. Instead of waiting the normal 5-10 minutes for a train we waited 40-ish minutes in "going-out" clothes in the middle of January.
I have never been more relieved to see a train in my life. But that euphoria would soon end when it became clear that the train was stopping at the next stop for 30 minutes (we never found out why). So there we sat, on a train in Berlin with the bell towers chiming 3 am thinking about how we had to be packed and on the busy in three hours to go to our next destination.
When we finally made it back to the main travel hub nearest our hotel the disaster that was our travel back became even worse. The buses were not running and the train that would take us to our hotel would not be there for another 20 minutes.
So what did we do? We walked. Although it was not necessarily a long walk, it is a tad intimidating walking in a large city at night in a group of young women.
If I was happy when I saw that train, I was ecstatic to see the sign for our hotel. I could have sprinted up the stairs faster than Usain Bolt at that point (well, probably not) just as long as I could get two hours of sleep. And just as the clock hit 4 am I flopped down on my hotel bed and took off my confetti filled shoes and passed out the second my shoes hit the ground.
