This past weekend, I went on a school organized trip to Berlin, Germany. I had been there before when I was ten, but everything still felt very new. It was my first time in a European hostel, so I was a little concerned on the way there with cleanliness and safety – but it turned out to be a great place to stay.
My new group of exchange student friends from EM Strasbourg are mostly from various countries in Europe, so our group decisions have a lot of Laissez-Faire influence. Typical Joanna would have researched extensively beforehand and planned out the two short days we had. Instead, once we got settled, we simply figured out what streets had the “most to see” and casually found our way there. We used maps as little as possible, we just went with the flow.
Gradually we decided what we all wanted to see the most and managed to make our way to everything at a leisurely pace, stopping at anything interesting on the way. We saw the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Parliament and Parliament Museum, the Holocaust Memorial and a couple other landmarks. The benefit of not being too organized was that if we stumbled on something interesting while on route, we stopped we were doing to see it. We accidentally came across a Volkswagon (and several other European car companies I’ve never seen) exhibit, stopped to watch street performers and watched a giant protest going on in a main square.
This first trip has given me insight into how great it is to explore on foot when travelling. We could have gotten a train pass to get to where we wanted to go faster, or we could have bought a tourist bus ticket that would have shown us absolutely everything. Walking on foot my mean you won’t see every attraction, but it puts you right in the energy of the city, and it makes the experience that much better.