Home is where... my bed is.

We have returned from Germany!  The flight was easy, though I was sick so not entirely pleasant for my sinuses.

We arrived in Raleigh yesterday evening and I was greeted by two of my lovely sorority sisters.  We stopped for a snack at a frozen yogurt shop and they prodded me for information of my time in Berlin, though they had also been following my blog.  I shared with them some of the details I have not shared with you yet, but will now.

Berlin has a strange social culture that I could not get a beat on.  It's like 90s grunge has made a come back in Berlin.  But no two people look the same.  The United States (especially rural and/or suburban areas) is not particularly individualistic in their style, most people are just cookie cutters of jeans and tshirts.  In Berlin I saw middle aged women with bright red or purple hair, all kinds of piercings, gages, tattoos, combat boots, stockings, camouflage, cut off jean shorts, half shaved heads, mohawks, faux hawks, etcetera.

Germany is also very liberal in many different ways.  It's perfectly acceptable to pick up a beer on the way home and walk around the street or the subway drinking it.

Sex is an accepted act.  Katie and I spent an afternoon lying in a park and people were incredibly friendly with each other knowing that there were hundreds of other people just lounging close by.

Dogs may as well be humans in the city.  They are every where, and are perfectly behaved in public.  I only heard one dog bark the whole time.  They sit in cafes, they ride the subways, it's totally normal.

English is very widely spoken.  Almost all signs are in German and English.  It made it easy to get around, but also gave us a crutch on which to lean.  It was rare to find someone who did not speak at least functional English.  In the US it's rare to find someone who speaks even a little of another language (if they're native).

All in all I loved Berlin.  I can't see it as a potential place to live.  Even though many people, especially our tour guides felt that Berlin was a great city option because it has every thing to offer but is slower paced and cheap for a capital city, I just couldn't see myself fitting in there long term.  However, it was a fantastic visit and I feel like I got a great perspective of the culture!

I am slightly jet lagged from the trip.  I literally fell into bed last night and was so thankful at how soft it was.  I woke up at 5:30 this morning, unable to fall back asleep I went to the gym, grocery shopping, cleaned the kitchen, made all my meals for the week, finished my book, and then went to work.  I am hoping that by tomorrow I'll be back on a relatively normal schedule but I do have to work early most days of the summer so it's not too far off.

In the news today there was a headline story about a US Airways flight from Paris to Charlotte that was forced to make an emergency landing in Maine because a woman was claiming that she had a device implanted in her.  Thankfully that was not our flight yesterday!!  We did have two slight medical emergencies on two of our different flights, both just people passing out for an unknown reason.