...And I thought I wouldn't have any interesting stories

Of course, getting there was half the battle.  Everything was relatively smooth until the black hole called Herzogenrath.  That was the beginning of our train troubles on the way to Denmark.  This trip, we waited for our train to Duisberg, but it never came.  The station attendant herded us to a charter bus packed with German tourists and told us we would have to take it to another station. 

At the time, it didn't strike me as an odd situation.  Now when I reflect on it, the whole ordeal seems like it could have been a great beginning to a scary movie.  A bunch of naive backpackers board a weird, outdated charter bus to nowhere.  Thankfully we made it to Berlin 6 hours later and were only an hour later than our original plans. 

The S-bahn (above-ground city trains) train station we exited from to walk to our hostel had definitely been on the East Berlin side.  Probably the best way I can describe it was rough around the edges.  Even 19 years after the re-unification, it still held an aura of neglect.  Crossing over the river into Kreuzberg, the city looked less GDR-ish.  The rooms at our hostel were themed by countries--and of course we got the Netherlands room.  All that really entailed was red, white and blue horizontal stripes (their flag's colors) around the room and a flag pinned to the ceiling.  This has been the largest room I've stayed in so far: 18 people!

For dinner we lapsed into our comfort zone (and convenience zone...it was right on the corner) and went to a Mexican cantina.  All of our waiters were Indian, which we found immensely funny.  I split a chicken quesadilla and it was edible but sub-par to what I normally enjoy.  Rakhi ended up having to speak to our waiters in Hindi to straighten out our bill.  What an interesting twist--having to speak Hindi in to Indians in a Mexican restaurant in Germany.  I bet that's something that doesn't happen every day. 

After dinner, Christa, Emily, Greg, Jason, Kirsten, me, other Lauren, Nick and Rakhi went exploring around our part of Berlin.  At one point we were walking parallel to the Spree river .  I noticed a six foot high cement wall along the river, so I jokingly said, "Hey, it's the Berlin Wall!"  Later I found out that my joke really was true.  What do you know...

Saturday morning we had a group field trip to the History of Medicine museum of the Charité hospital.  It had fascinating spacey-mans (took me awhile to figure out this was our tour guide's pronunciation of specimens...)  but was, in my opinion, inferior to Guy's hospital museum in London.  If anything, the two were very similar, almost to the point where I wondered why we went to both. 

A bunch of us had plans to go on the free bike tour in Berlin.  The problem was, we didn't make it on time...yet again.  We wandered around the Mitte (center of town) on Oranienburger Strasse for awhile, trying to find Jake (our teachers' son).  Nick and Rakhi stopped at the Neue Synagogue (it survived Kristallnacht) but my hunger trumped any sight-seeing. 

We saw a group of Baylor kids outside an Indian restaurant and they said it was really good.  Wondering why we hadn't seen Nick/Rakhi/Jake, we sat outside so we could see if they walked by.  I had a dish called Chicken Vindaloo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindaloo   that was supposed to be very spicy.  It was delicious, but not even a hint of heat.  The whole time we were sitting at the restaurant (called Amrit, found out later that it is mentioned in my guidebook) all of us kept wondering where Rakhi was.  She had wanted Indian food really bad and now that we finally got some, she wasn't there! 

In the middle of chowing down, the Baylor group we saw earlier came back to our table.  Lizette said in a very calm voice, "Hey guys, Rakhi just got hit by a car."  My immediate reaction was, "WHAAAAT??"  with an incredulous tone.  I honestly thought it was a joke.  It had to be.  Then we realized Lizette wasn't kidding and our friend might be in serious trouble. 

Telling the story later, Nick hadn't been with Rakhi the exact instant she got hit.  But, being the good little pre-med student that he is, he saw that someone was in distress and went to help.  Then he realized it was someone he knew!  He went with her in the ambulance to Charité hospital (talk about irony...) and we got word later that she was fine but obviously in pain/shook up.  At 7:30 we went to visit her and bring her important documents. 

Maybe it was because we were there on a Saturday night, but the hospital was devoid of people.  It was another scene in our scary movie.  The running joke was that we were all in a scary movie, losing characters left and right to various incidents until one person, the protagonist, was left.