Lots of slower days now that I'm spending so much time with Adam. The coordination and planning between multiple people seems to take the pace of my days way down, which is nice in some ways but less in others. I'm not seeing anywhere near as much of the city each day as I used to be. With the marathon tomorrow, Adam didn't want to walk much, so we met up in the afternoon and formulated a plan for where we'd be on the race route and how we'd meet. Getting to him was harder than usual because a bunch of subway lines were shut down due to the roller blade marathon going on, so I had to route weirdly. One of the stops I went to had a very confusing setup where it was actually two completely unconnected stations that just share a name, but are served by different lines. They're close to one another but i feel like that only makes it more confusing. As a side note since I don't know where else to put this - Berlin is one of the only subways I've been on outside of Boston where cell service is good in the tunnels. NYC and London both have this issue where you're completely disconnected while underground and it's always frustrated me. From there we got dinner and I went back to the hostel. On the train back a bunch of German 14 year olds tried convincing me to move to Ohio and to vote for Trump because he has "aura", which I took to mean that German middle schoolers are very similar to American ones. Back in the hostel I ate some food with this Ukrainian woman from my dorm who's extremely talkative. I asked her about the war and how it effected her, but she didn't have much to say that I hadn't heard before. Later in the evening I started a conversation with an Indian guy who now lives in Warsaw, and we went out to a nearby bar to have a beer. It was really a cocktail bar but it was right on a river and was the only thing close by that wasn't totally packed. It was also quite cold last night, which I suppose is a sign of things to come.

I've booked a stay here through Tuesday night. I still haven't seen a lot of what I'd like to in Berlin so I don't think this is too much time at all. That friend from Rotterdam I had intended to meet in Amsterdam (which didn't work out since she had to adjust her schedule) is also coming on Monday morning, so we'll overlap for a few days. Then it's off to Denmark for a few days to meet the parents in Copenhagen, which I'm really looking forward to. On top of my NZ lockdown era friends from Denmark, I've got at least one more Whatsapp contact who I'm interested in meeting there too. Hopefully my train route ends up going on the ferry; I think that would be a cool experience.