A shade of German: Super trains, back pain and bewildering shopping hours

The train network here is just fantastic! While I was here last time on exchange I mostly took the main lines through the city on the rural service from my town. But this time we’re going all out, jumping on and off all over the place because we CAN! Maybe I should show you what the underground map looks like. For someone who spent many hours cursing Connex and their reliably late trains that often picked parts of the line to stop where there was no station, the system here is sadly quite exciting!
At the moment we’re living close to ‘Gesundbrunnen’ station. You most probably can´t see where that is, no matter.

So super train networks aside, my back really isn´t doing too well. It´s probably because of the crappy beds and pillows i´ve been sleeping on, so hopefully when we settle into a routine at uni in a few weeks it should feel better. When i can unload my suitcase and aren´t constantly bending down to get stuff out of it, my back might get a bit of a rest.

Due to the horribly low 20 Kilo limit coming here on the plane Jeremy and I both left many things at home with the expectation that we could pick up lots of things here. That we have done. Jeremy found a nice warm jacket, I some pants and so on. However, one thing that has been a bit confusing to navigate around are the strange seemingly random hours that many shops are open. If we were to rely on the old 9-5pm opening times, then we definately wouldn´t have got very far!

Supermarkets seem to be the easiest to navigate around, they seem to be mostly open 8am to 8pm monday to friday, saturday is all over the place and sunday, well about 4 supermarkets in the whole city seem to be open on sundays.

Clothing and shoe shops are the most bewildering. it seems to depend upon the area that you´re in. Monday to friday they´re open mostly 12-8pm with 5-7pm seemingly being the ´busy´shopping period of the day. Saturday I don´t really get yet and Sunday only a few of the Big Big department stores are open from about 1-6pm.

Bakeries and Flower shops seem to be the only things constantly open. But really, who needs flowers that often?

In other news we´ve been going on nice long discovery walks and here are a few pictures from our wanderings.

Jeremy with his mates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of Communism. Suffice to say this park, a homage to them both, is in the old east, i.e. communist, Berlin