Falling behind on these so I'll have a double header tonight.

Tuesday wasn't the most exciting. Matteo (Italian) and Sergio (Mexican) left today, though Jade (Australian) is still here and will be for some time. We spent a lot of the day just chatting in one of the dorm rooms - she's nothing like most of the other 20 year olds I've met on this trip so far and actually makes for great conversation. At one point I went out to check out the Museuminslet, which is a cool and extremely dense cluster of museums all across this island in the river Spree (which apparently just means "river"??? I didn't think it was possible for there to be a name for a river that I hated more than "Fish" but here we are). I didn't actually end up going into any of them, in part because some of the ones I was most interested were closed, and partially because I didn't feel like paying for a ton of different museums. Were I to do things again, I'd buy the all inclusive museum pass ahead of time, but I didn't feel like I'd have enough time to get value out of it here. I also stopped by the Reichstag, which is a cool building that I'll never be able to shake a rather evil association with. I had hoped to walk in since it's free, but apparently you need to have all manner of government documents and prebooking to get in. Instead I headed west through the giant park that was there. It was very nice, but it wasn't all that exciting and the worsening weather put something of a damper on my enjoyment. I did a lot of wandering around the city today since I've started to run out of free things that interest me around here. Given how low hostel rates have dropped, I'm well below my spending targets and counterintuitively feel extra incentivized to be cheap elsewhere. I met back up with Marianne from Rotterdam for dinner (pho) which was nice, although I found that conversation was much more difficult than it had been the first time we met. I'm not sure why, seeing as that was only a few weeks ago, though I think it's probably since we weren't actively exploring or engaging with much of anything. I'm still extremely interested to hear about her transatlantic adventures this winter.

Wednesday will be my last real day here. By leaving at 5:45 on Thursday morning I can get to Copenhagen within a few hours of my parents, and since I fully expect to be up late into the night anyway I just won't book a hostel. Jade can store my things in her room for the day. Twenty bucks saved is twenty bucks earned, and since I have no other way of earning money now, that sounds pretty good. I'll sleep on the 8 hour train ride instead.