I left a little late and started the morning by sprinting across the city with all my bags to catch my bus on time. It got me to Berlin before noon, so I checked into the hostel and then went to that rail engineering conference. It was an absolutely enormous conference on a scale I've never seen before. Supposedly, there were around 150k attendees this week, and seeing how many buildings the event spanned, I can believe it. Some of the "booths" were pretty ridiculous and often took up half the event hall they were staged in while having multiple floors. The Japan Railways one featured a woman playing some sort of traditional Japanese string instrument in addition to an entire sushi bar. One of the Chinese booths had a calligraphy teacher. Another one of the Chinese booths had a bunch of guys dressed as Yuan dynasty soldiers and had them mock dueling. The Kazak Rail booth had horse archers in their full regalia. I guess they think it will pay off somehow? I'm not sure who's basing their rail infrastructure off a costume contest, but apparently there's a market for that. I talked with the guys from my company for a while and it was the usual corporate schmoozing. We'll see what they thought of me soon, I suppose.

Immediately after that, I headed out to meet Adam and Anahita (who also arrived just hours before) at the Berlin Philharmonic, apparently one of the most well respected orchestras in the world. It was excellent, particularly a harpist who was only on for one of the pieces they played, but clearly stole the show. She had a way of playing a fairly complicated backing tune and then simultaneously layering in a vastly more intricate melody despite still only having ten fingers. There were also a few trumpets who I felt I could appreciate in a particularly acute way; I sometimes forget that it's possible to make a brass instrument sound so smooth. At one point, an older woman had to be dragged out of the hall unconscious - I still have no idea what happened.

On the way home, I took the bus and ended up waiting for 20 minutes before realizing that the bus stop had been temporarily moved a few blocks over. Nobody else at the stop had figured this out yet somehow (including the locals) and I had to explain to everyone that we were all in the wrong place. This included these two Russian women that I got chatting with, who were travelling around Europe. I didn't even realize that was possible - it sounds like it's a huge pain, though I wanted to ask their thoughts on the war but they didn't volunteer a stance so I didn't prod. The public transit around here is pretty good but also very expensive. I thought it was free at first since there's no turnstiles or obvious way of paying, but it turns out there's an app you have to buy tickets through and they periodically come around on trains to demand your ticket. Each ride will cost you over 3 euros, and unlike the London underground (maybe slightly more expensive per ride) where the system will cap your expenses for the day at about 8 pounds no matter how much you travel, Berlin's metro doesn't seem to have a max. I ended up buying a week pass for 40 euros since I imagine I'll be depending on it pretty heavily this next week or so.

I bought some doner before checking into the hostel and it was excellent for only 7 euros. The hostel itself isn't that exciting but it's serviceable. The worst part was hauling all my bags up to the 5th floor where my dorm was, and then hauling them all back down this morning. We're on the east side of town, right along the street where the wall used to run; I'm actually not sure which side of it we'd be on right now. I'm at a different hostel tonight so I'll have to track that down too, and then I'll go out to explore the city. I really saw very little of it yesterday since I was so focused on being in specific places.