Berlin, Germany

Hi there!! Welcome to the most chaotic travel day I’ve had so far!! But I ended in up Berlin and that's all that matters!

First, the plan:

James and I get to reunite just in time for his birthday and the Noah Kahan concert in Berlin!! This marks the beginning of James’s time in Europe travelling around and spending time with me!! So the plan was for both of us to land in Berlin at noon-ish on August 26th then spend the week together travelling northern Germany and Amsterdam.

Now, let me tell you what Scandinavian Airlines had in store for me mere hours before take off.

24 hours before departure: On August 25th, I woke up nice and early, to check in and make sure I got a window seat and all was good:)

20 hours before departure: I got an email that said "SAS is experiencing some strikes that may affect your flight, to check the status of your flight, click this link". To which I clicked and my flight was still scheduled to go! Yay!

19 hours before departure: "your flight has been cancelled. We are currently working on rebooking you." Now this was my first flight of the day, my Trondheim to Oslo flight. I didn't immediately panic because they have lots of the flights and more importantly, my Oslo to Berlin flight was still unaffected!

18 hours before departure: "we have rebooked your Trondheim-Oslo flight to the next flight of the day." That's helpful, however now I am landing in Oslo at the same time as my flight to Berlin is leaving... that's not going to work! So I spent the next 1 hour and 23 minutes on hold then finally getting a representative to book the earlier flight after she told me that flight was overbooked.... But somehow I got a ticket for it. So now we are 13 hours until departure.

8 hours before departure (10 PM now): I get an email that my Oslo-Berlin flight has been cancelled and they rebooked me on the flight on August 28th (two days later). Well, that's not going to work so back on the phone I go. However, their offices are closed from 7 PM to 7 AM so no one is answering and my flight leaves at 7 AM. So I start frantically looking on Google for alternative flights. Norwegian Airlines has a flight from Oslo to Berlin a couple of hours later but they are completely sold out. SAS has a flight through Copenhagen but they are completely sold out. KLM has 1 ticket from Trondheim, through Amsterdam to Berlin landing at 11:30 AM on the 26th but it leaves at 6 AM so I booked that and now it is 3 hours before I need to get on a bus to the airport.

A short sleep later, I got on my KLM flight.

The only good part of the chaos of this travel day was the beautiful 5:30 AM sunrise!

When the SAS offices finally opened, I called and waited on hold for my entire layover in Amsterdam (2 hours) and got to talk to a service representative for 40 seconds where he told me that I couldn't do anything until I completed the journey (flew back to Trondheim in a week from now) then he rudely hung up on me.

I stewed over that for my whole flight to Berlin.

But the travel drama all worked out and I got to see James!!!

We were lucky enough that my cousin Victoria let us stay at her apartment so we dropped off our bags there then got familiar with the neighbourhood!

We walked through a park, only got lost once, and found a patio in the sun to enjoy our first German beer.

We had a little snack of sandwiches, that weren't even that good before relaxing for a little bit before meeting with Vic for dinner!

We met at a really cute Asian fusion restaurant because I was really craving sushi (you'll see that theme in these next blog posts). We had a really nice time chatting then walked home and went straight to bed. Who would've guessed that 2.5 hours of sleep for me the night before and flying across the Atlantic and being in a new time zone for James would be tiring?

The next morning we woke up very excited because it was James's birthday!!

The plan for today was to see as much of Berlin as possible and as much as our feet would allow! We started with a bus trip into the more historical part of Berlin where were had a good brunch then we started the walk along the main road: Unter den Linden. This road has everything you need to see in Berlin all in 1390 metres!

We started at the Cathedral and didn't go in as my shoulder were visible and we were worried about being too provocative.

We then figured out why they call it Muesum Island, we walked passed the Lustgaten, the New Guardhouse, Humboldt University, many palaces and embassies, the Opera, the statue of Frederick the Great, the Ampelmann store, and ended at the Brandenburg Gate.

We didn't stop there though, and had to see the Reichstag Building for ourselves too. It was massive and under construction so we couldn't get too close but this whole part of Berlin is so cool and full of history (as well as tourists).

After resting our tired feet for a little bit we headed to a beer garden for some traditional German dinner of beer, sausage and potatoes.

For the last event of the evening, we got to see Noah Kahan in concert! He was SO GOOD and the venue was an open air Citadelle with only 6000 people so we got to be so close to him! We met a new friend from Hamburg who was really nice and I also got to meet 2 girls in front of me that were not so nice!

After a big birthday day, we slept soundly and the next morning we woke up for our last day in Berlin.

We had breakfast at a spot close to the apartment and even got a show from a drunk guy who kept having to be forcibly removed from the area! What a way to start the day!

No visit to Berlin would be complete without being bombarded by a ton of information about the Berlin Wall, unsung heroes of many political events, the state of the world in every country at the time of the wall and all the wars since, and that's exactly what we got at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. All jokes aside, it actually was a very cool museum with really cool exhibits and information, but the organization and scale of the place had me very overwhelmed and I think I left more confused about history than I was when I entered.

With sufficiently tired feet and full heads, we hopped on a FlixBus from Berlin and Hamburg and continued our little tour!