Germans Are Really Nice: Part 2

Getting Lost





Part2:


Part of the experience of being in a new city is getting lost in it. We managed to get that item checked off of our Things to Do List our very first night in Berlin. On our first night, it was getting late so we decided to head back from Potsdamer Platz since my host family told me the Bahn system stops running at 1AM on weekdays. So we headed back to the station, but the entrance was blocked! “O crap.” Keep in mind it was 0 Degrees Celsius outside and none of us were dressed accordingly since we had definitely underestimated how cold it gets. It was freezing and we didn’t know where to go; just to get warmth we jumped on a random bus, cause apparently they were still running. While we were on the bus, we started looking at our maps to find a way back, and this nice old 50 year German grandpa asked us something in German. At this point, I've had only 1 quarter of German, a course taken over 6 months before, which meant I had forgotten everything. All I heard was the word “Wo” so I deciphered that he was asking us where we were trying to go. We told him the name of the station, and he just went off in a string of German while pointing at different spots on the map. The entire conversation was really funny cause he was helping us and telling us what we needed to know, but we couldn't understand anything. Once in a while I would try to interject with a couple words I did know in German. Yet somehow within all the jumble, he was able to understand me telling him that the U-Bahn (the train system) was closed, and in response, he was able to tell me in German what I understood to be “No, it’s open.” We said danke to this man, who amazingly was able to help us without speaking a single word of English. We got off the bus and walked around to find the nearest U-Bahn station and low and behold, it was OPEN. For some reason, it was just that one station that we came out of that was closed. Thank you so much to the German man who helped us get home. Unfortunately, even after getting onto that train we still ended up getting lost cause there were all these connections and transfers. But to make a long story short, we kept getting on and off trains, then missing trains, and thus having to wait 10 minutes at a time in the freezing cold, but in the end we made it back to my place at 2:30AM. YAY!