The next morning we had booked a tour which was going to take us on basically the same path as the day before but give us some extra information. We were also planning on doing a pub crawl at night to experience the famous Berlin nightlife. The tour was great and we learned a lot. I did not realized that there was two walls with the Berlin Wall. That would have made escape virtually impossible with two walls, snipers in watch towers and mines in between the walls. Some people were so desperate to leave that they built hot air balloons or tunnelled under the wall to escape the Soviet occupied East Berlin. Our guide also brought us to the university that many Nobel prize winners (like Eistein and Karl Marx) taught at, which is the same area where the famous "book burning" took place. On May 10, 1933 the nazis burned all books that were determined to be "un-german".
After our tour we took off to the western part of the Berlin Wall. We saw all of the beautiful graffiti on the wall. We then walked back to the centre of town where we signed up for our pub crawl. We made it to the first bar and had a beer with some Canadians, Americans and New Zealanders. The it was off to the second bar where we had a couple more beer and introduced the others to flip cup! Apparently Germans and New Zealanders don't play drinking games... What's the point of drinking? Since we had our bags with us we were both worried about losing them or having them stolen at the bar, so Katherine took the memory card out of the camera and I put it in my wallet to be safe. We went to a couple other bars and tried some different beer while having some great conversations with the other travellers. We finished the night around 1:30 am still with our backpacks and made our way to the metro to head home. After about four stops we realized we had to get off in a rush and I happened to leave the train without my bag. I turned around as I noticed and the doors shut and train left. The camera, my souvenirs, my iPod and a few other important things were in that bag. My heart felt like it fell out of my chest.
The next day we were supposed to leave but we spent the day trying to track down my bag. As luck would have it, it was another Holliday. Father's Day. On a Thursday. So, nothing was open and no one at the metro station speaks English. It was a frustrating day and we really got nothing accomplished. We decided to stay another night and hope that it showed up. We checked the offices on Friday but did not find anything. We walked around Berlin again and found a street performer who was doing an old game of "follow the ball". We watched for a couple minutes and realized that the people playing were clearly part of the scheme. However, we had both followed the ball correctly a couple of times. This guy had taken 50 euros from multiple tourists. On the last one Katherine and I saw that he had a little slip up and we clearly saw the ball under the cup at the end. We decided to pay him 50 bucks in an effort to double our money (and maybe put it towards a new camera) We flipped the cup over and the ball was not there. So, now we have no camera and 50 euros less! We got played but we are able to laugh about our stupidity in Berlin now. The lost and found offices are closed on the weekend so we took off at 11:45pm on another overnight bus to Auschwitz. We are still holding out hope that the bag shows up but we are not very optimistic. At least we have the memory card! Berlin was a wonderful place where we unfortunately have some terrible memories.
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