I really love this city. In fact, it has officially made my list of cities to live in someday, which makes two on this trip alone. First of all, let me tell you a bit about who I'm staying with: my friend Ingo is a native German who lived in the US for 12 years, and so is 100% fluent in both languages. He and I used to work in the same psych lab together, and he graduated from CU May of '06. He's the first American student to be accepted to an East German university since the fall of the Berlin wall, and to pay the bills he works for Fat Tire Bicycle Tours leading English-speaking tours of the city. It's 20Euros (18E for a student) and you ride around the whole city for 4.5 hours, stopping every few hundred meters to talk about the sites. I took the tour day before yesterday and it knocked my socks off. I had expected it to be touristy, but found it was really just fun and informative. Berlin is a very bike-friendly city, being as flat as it is, and I learned a lot about life during the soviet era, especially. Among other things, I saw the Berlin Wall, rode through the Brandenburg Gates (like everyone who's ever conquered Berlin), explored the Tiergarden, and a beer garden. :-)
Which brings me to the Berlin nightlife. I don't get to go to much in the way of clubs in the States, being as I am only 20, but I still know that the US has nothing to compare to the bars and clubs here. My first night in town I went with the guys from the bike shop on a pub crawl, and it seems that every nightlife venue in Berlin has a different theme! We started off at an Irish Pub (actually run my Irish folks) and listened to live music there, then went to a hookah bar (no, I didn't partake), then to a 5-storey bar with a different live band on each level. I parked myself on level 3 for an hour, where there were maybe 20 people sitting around on low sofas in the dim red light listening to a group of german guys play Bo Diddley and BB King. It was great, see picture below (had to use a flash, so it's a bit over-exposed). Night before last we went to a bar/restaurant where all the politicians go after work and saw a ton of Parliament members drinking a sweet beer (I forgot the name, it starts with a K) that comes in tiny glasses, then we went next door to a place that is a stock exchange theme. As more people order the beer, the price goes up, and the market peaks and crashes according to supply and demand. We actually arrived during a crash and so got really good .5L beers for under 2E. Tomorrow night we're going to a ping-pong bar. I really have no idea what that means, but Ingo said yes, you do actually play ping-pong there, so we'll see...
Don't get the impression, however, that all I'm doing every night is drinking. On the contrary, last night we went to the grocery store and bought brats, came back to the apartment and cooked them. We also rented and watched Citizen Kane and Young Frankenstein, hehe. Tomorrow we're going to a museum and to the zoo! I'm looking forward to seeing Knut, the famous polar bear. There's also talk of going to see the Berlin Opera, but we'll see how much that's going to cost.
I've also officially run out of room on my camera. 455 pictures and five 10sec videos. I burned them all to a CD I'm going to guard with my life until I get back to the states and then deleted them from the camera, so it's going to take a while to whittle them down to slide-show material for y'all. Anyway, the ones on here are of the Wall and the Parliament building, and that cool blues bar. I'm sure I'll be posting more soon as I see more of the city, and will have tons to show when I get home in 6 days!