"Just so you know, we are never walking anywhere ever again."

The frustration behind the freakin’ S-Bahn in Berlin was a bit incredible. My friend (codename: Star Command, as per her request) generally knew where we were… we just couldn’t figure out how to get to anywhere we wanted to be.

The first night was, hands down, the worst. She flew in that morning, I didn’t get in until about dinnertime, and then we went to Alexanderplatz to wander around and find something to eat. We hung out, we ate, we told stories about our time abroad so far, and then we got on a train to go back.

The train passed our stop without stopping. We didn’t notice for a while. Finally, we looked out the window and realized there weren’t any buildings around, only some kind of a freeway. And it felt a bit like the middle of nowhere (later, after getting back to Edinburgh, I found out it wasn’t quite the middle of nowhere, but it was the faaaaaarrrrr end of Berlin.)

So we jumped off at Wannsee, spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to get to Charlottenburg (our stop for the hostel) and double-checking so we didn’t end up messing up again. The closest we could get (without waiting for two hours, since it was well after midnight by this point) was two stops too far to the stop for the Zoo (which, coincidentally, is the same stop we’re at in the above video. =P). So we were like, “Yeah, we can just walk from there. It’ll be faster than waiting until two in the morning for the perfect train.”

So we hung out for an hour and basically spent the whole time leaping up from our seats on a bench whenever we heard a train approaching, juuuust in case it was the one we wanted to take. Then we got on the (correct) train, got off at the (correct) stop, and walked.

For an hour and twenty minutes.

I won’t say it wasn’t fun, and that there wasn’t plenty of hysterical laughter and jokes about blog entries (“And then we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, and then we went the wrong direction and walked some more!”), but it was exhausting and by the end we were both definitely wishing we had waited for the proper train.