New Years, Ireland, and Berlin

Hey kids :)

If I can get this blog done, I'll actually be caught up! (For the record, I wrote that line nearly two weeks ago. whoops!)

So first off, HAPPY NEW YEAR. This is the year of balance. I think perhaps towards the end of last year I made some ridiculous decisions that were not so balanced, so I've decided that this year I'm going to practice weighing the pros and cons of things before I go and make important decisions about my life. Furthermore, when I have a list of bigger cons than pros, I'm going to try and actually follow the list and heed the cons. In other words, I'm going to practice making more informed choices about "what-not-to-do" when the odds are against me. (AND, I recommend everyone else tries this, if you don't do it already.)

I got back to London on NYE, and I was really not looking forward to New Years because I really wanted to spend it in the States with my tried-and-true friends. Everyone always says that the best New Years Eves always happen when you don't have high expectations. Well, my expectations were lower than low this year, and I had a COMPLETE blast! The Irish Lads, and Eimear were over from Ireland, and we spent New Years together.

First, we went to the Embankment/London Bridge area and watched the famous London fireworks. Much in the same way that people go to Times Square to watch the ball drop, people here go to the fireworks.

Here we are in the only group picture of the night, which of course has to be fuzzy. UGH. We were freezing our asses off, and I guess so was our photographer. (We brought the New Year in FREEZING cold, which has since been a theme of my year.)

Afterwards, we went to a party in a club. I thought it was going to be lame, as clubs are, but one of the floors of the club played really crappy 80's music, so it was great. (Really crappy 80's music=uninhibited crazy dancing!) The theme of the night was red and white, hence the wrist band and feathers. Paddy was wearing a red and white tie, but most of the boys ditched them before the evening was over.
This is an end of the night photo. The girls without the feathers are not our friends. I don't know who they are!

After new years, I went to Dublin for a couple days to hang out with the lads some more, see Mariel and celebrate Eimear's birthday, and to see 2manydjs.

This is an amazing crowd shot of 2manydjs. We were in the VIP section (oh yea!) so we had a really good view of everything. I'm not a huge fan of electronic music, as you all know, but this is the second time I've seen them, and they always make me want to dance my pants off. (Luckily, I wasn't wearing any pants to begin with, in order to minimize the scandal.)

We are pretty cute, if I do say so myself. Can I be an honorary Irish person and stay forever? Please, pretty please with a cherry on top? It's not that I don't like England, I do!, but I just love Ireland so much BETTER! Stupid visa rules are the bane of my existence.

I stayed with Mariel while I was in Ireland, but I still wish we could have caught up some more! She's the best, have I mentioned that lately? Here she is being cutsie-pants with her boyfriend Ciaran. (How come SHE gets to have an Irish boyfriend after I leave?!!!!)

Then, my travels led me to Berlin, Germany with Marisa. Let me just start out by saying that I WILL be back. Five days was NOT long enough. Berlin, for all it's bombed out history, has come back with a cultural vengeance. It has 141 museums/galleries--more than any other city in the WORLD. And there is just SO much to see. We didn't even get a dent into the monumental list of "must sees and must do-s" in Berlin.

Here is a photo of Marisa and I, half-dead of frostbite. Our first day there we went on a four hour walking tour. Let me just tell you, I have NEVER been so cold. Not hiking in the Patagonias. Not skiing in the Adirondacks. Not being without power and having no heat. Never, NEVER have I been this cold. Apparently, Germany just happened to be getting a cold front from Siberia. Okay. RIGHT. So, we saw a bunch of the things you are "supposed" to see when you visit Berlin: Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall, the Brandenburg Wall, crazy new-ish architecture, and lots of cool war/struggle monuments.

This is one monument that I thought was particularly awesome. It has had it's name changed many times, but now it is just a Memorial to fallen veterans. The artist put the woman with child sculpture in a room with no ceiling, so she "feels" the elements just like everyone else. Of course, when we went to visit, she was feeling the crazy cold front, and snow.

The next day we went to the Jewish Museum. It is one of the best museums I've ever been to. SO informative and thorough. (Apparently, the German stereotype of extreme organization proved itself to us during our stay in Berlin, through the AMAZING amount of information we inhaled through various museum plaques and "audioguides." (Marisa loves the audioguides...and I may have become a convert in my old age.) The Jewish Museum took us through history from the Kabbalah all the way to present day. Oddly, I found that there was no section in the museum about the creation of Israel. Is that some sort of German political stance? I definitely think so. We also went to the TV Tower and got some cool views of the city.

On day three we went to the Altes Museum and the East Side Gallery. The East Side Gallery is just a fairly well-preserved section of the Berlin Wall. It has some great (and not so great) graffiti on it.

Some of the graffiti is political, like in this photo, but a lot of it is just crappy artists trying to get their crappy art seen. I preferred the political stuff.

The Altes Museum has one of the largest collections of Egyptian art in the world. (Probably, I'm really just making that statistic up.) Again, it took us about 4 hours to get through the museum, due to the high content of audio-guide information. I swear, Marisa and I are the slowest museum go-ers EVER.

The highlight of the Altes Museum, obviously, is the Bust of Nefertiti. I never knew she was unfinished, and thus has a freaky eye-hole. Oh yea. Gotta love the fun-facts.

Our last full day in Berlin we went to a modern art museum, the Reichstag, and the best darn Chip shop that side of Ireland. In case you were wondering, the Reichstag dome is NOT inside. It is just a dome with no sides...in other words, it is COLD. (Surprise, surprise!)

Our last night also happens to be the only night we went out in Berlin, seeing as it was SO cold! We ended up at this really awesome bar, recommended to us by our lovely hostel bartender. The bar (Kharma Noia) had a labyrinth inside of it! You had to get down to the secret room in the bar, and once there, you could get a ticket for the maze. Marisa was too chicken to go (sorry M!), but I figured that we had trekked all the way there, I might as well do it. New York should jump on the bar/entertainment bandwagon, cause it was AWESOME. Afterwards, we went to a crappy indie-rock club, but we felt very old, so we left.

All in all, Berlin was a fantastic, albeit freezing, experience. The people that we met were great, everyone was very friendly, and there is just so so so much to do! (If anyone ever wants to go back...let me know!)

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Love Sarah