Euro-trip, birthdays and "valborg".

Happy "valborg" (as we call it in Sweden) to everyone!

In Berlin people don't really celebrate Valborg, that's the day before 1:th of May, but the actual day of 1:th of May is a huge happening here. We were celebrating it in Kreuzberg in the park, like everyone else in Berlin - there were so many people! Also there are a lot of demonstrations that day, some riots and a lot of high-, dunk- and crazy people, so there were a whole crowed of policemen as well (dressed in helmets and shields - scary). We had a great day though, and we spent most of the time in the park, drinking wine and listening to the music. Everything got a little bit crazy in the end though, so we moved forward to a bar.

(Me, Emma, Karoliina and Rebecca hade a small "valborg-session" the evening before 1:th of May in Emmas place though, with a bit of traditional Valborg-food and sparkling wine!;)).

Yesterday we went to Mauerpark (as always in Sundays - market-time). The weather was stunning, and we walked around, ate good food and bought some second-hand clothes.

I had a great time in München too! Me and Sara spent Friday and Saturday in München and we had time to walk around and see most of the famous thing in the city - Englisher Garten, the market place, Olympiastadion, Frühlingsfest (that's the second biggest beer-festival in München next after Octoberfest) and so on. We also went to an Erasmus party that was quite fun, but even more fun was the pizza-place we stopped by for drunk-food on our way home - and turned into a bollywood-club! We were dancing there for one hour haha!

At Sunday we hade seen enough of München though, so we decided to go somewhere else. So we hitchhiked to Austria, to Innsbruck. It was one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to! We spent the whole day there, and were going to hitchhike home in the evening - but ended up in Amsterdam instead! It's a long story, but we had a great time, and it was one of my best birthdays ever. We spent the day there during the King's day, and the whole city was on fire! Then we met up with Max and spent the night in his place.

The guys whom we were hitchhiking with to Amsterdam were really nice - and made sunglasses of old snowboards. How cool isn't that?

Anyway - it was a fun trip, and me and Sara were thinking of going on another one all the way to Italy or somewhere later in the summer. Hope it will happen!

At Friday I will go to Stockholm and to Örebro for the preparation course to India, and after that - Malta!

Have a great week (and watch out for the spring-flue - I just got one!).

Hugs!

 Erasmus-München and my sweetie :)

 München

 Turists in München

 In the middle of München centrum people were actually surfing in the river! It looked fun though.

 Olympiastadion

 Our truck driver from Italy who was driving us all the way to Innsbruck.

 Frühlingsfest - so many people drinking beer in one place.

 Innsbruck - in the middle of the alps.

 The best breakfast so far - croissant from Aldi ;)

 A cute coffehouse in München

 Cinema and the best - popcorn!

 Hitchhiking towards the German border. Took a loooong time to reach there.

 A map over Innsbruck. It's actually really close to both München and Italy.

 Sara together with our hitchhikers in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam and Munchen

Tjenaa!

In a few hours I will go to Munchen to visit Sara over the weekend, and I will go there with nightbus for only 5€! That's incredible cheap! I have stored up with a lot of candy, chocolate and snacks to survive 11 hours in the night, but I actually think it will be quite cosy!

This weekend Amanda, Jonas, Pierre and Richard were here visiting me, so we did a lot of touristic stuff, walked around a lot, saw the Jewish monuments, ate ice-cream and played football in parks. And ate pizza, pasta, and pizza again. God, it's horrible how much junk-food I eat here! I have gained many kilos haha. But I guess it will be +-0 when I go to India in August and I expect to have bad stomach in a half year there!

At Thursday we had our school semester starting party at Cassiopeia, and that was a really nice club! Me, Erica and Blai stayed there late (like 5.30 or something) before we eventually went eating dönerkebab (always!).

At Saturday we had dinner in one of my (former) favorite restaurants in Kreuzberg, but the evening ended up really badly. Karoliina got locked up in the toilet, and it took a reeeeeally long time before the stuff could get here out of there. The waitresses and the restaurant boss were really rude and un-polite too, and didn't even apologize once for the happening. Typical of lack of German service mind.

Emma got also some chocking news - she has to pay fees, 1600€, for downloading movies here! (and for all of you who don't already know that - check up your digital rights in Germany - they are so strict with downloading movies here, and even with streaming!!). The only way we could make her (and the rest of us too) in a better mood, was to get really drunk. And the evening actually turned out to be really fun in the end! We had a nice time at Kptn's (<3!), figuring out all kind of weird ways to earn money for Emmas fees, for instance trowing a big party, selling posters or other stuff. Later we went up to Maleks place and hanged out. The whole evening ended up with me and Emma hitchhiking towards Amsterdam, though... We had an bet with Rebecka that we would reach there before here (she was gonna take a flight there in the morning). We didn't really succeeded haha, but it was a fun adventure though!

Hope you all have a nice weekend, schönen abend! Tsyss!

 At the autobahn!

 Tiergarten

 Me and Kim found this swedish candy shop in Ostkreuz and were really happy about it! Herr Nilssons godisaffär :D

 Me and Mireia at Cassiopeia.

We went watching a theater play together with our school group yesterday, it was named "traschedy" and was about saving the environment and recycling. It was great in my opinion!

No ice cream for us.

Hi!!

Yesterday was the day of world-free-Ben&Jerrys-ice-cream-for-everyone. Except us. Me, Mireia, Marisa and Carlota were searching for a Ben&Jerrys coffeehouse that was supposed to be in Biesdorf close to Victor Jara, and even though it sounded a little bit weird that there would be any coffeeshop in that area, we were looking it up in the map and went there. Eventually we found the place - but there was no B&R coffeehouse. Instead we ended up in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, where the seller (50+) couldn't speak a single word English and probably thought we were totally out of our minds when we were asking if we could get any "frei ice", free ice-cream. Embarrassing!

Mikaela has been here during the weekend, and we had a nice time! At friday we started with having brunch in Warschauerstrasse, and that was delicious! Then we were going to a park next to the Berlin wall to drink some beer in the sun and enjoy the really nice summer-weather. What I didn't think about, though, was that I am from Finland, white, blond and can't be in the sun longer than maximum 10 minutes the first summer day - not 4 hours! So I burnt my skin really badly, got a little bit of a sunstroke and didn't feel very well after that. We went to partykeller for a while in the evening, but went home quite early.

Saturday we spent a lot of hours in Primark, before we ended up in Malek's place for a pre-party. After a while we went down to the pub Kptn and had some whiskey sours - and those are truly the best whisky sours ever! Just 2,80€, delicious and fresh!

Now it's really hot outside and sunny so I will go for a quick run before school (love to have evening-courses!).

Have a nice week all of you,

Puss&Kram

 Karoliina, Marisa, Mireia, Mikaela and me enjoying the sun.

 We found this cute coffeehouse together with Emma and Mikaela

 Mickan in the bar, where I forced her to try the Banana-beer!

 Me, Mikaela and Carlota at Kptn's

 Blai with a flower!

Me and Mikaela at the berlin wall.

Easter

Hi!!

Hope you all had a great Easter!

Mine was pretty busy, I was barely home during the nights, but I had a lot of fun! Ofc it felt a little bit sad to not spend Ester together with my family as usual, and I missed all the traditional Esterfood we eat in Finland (especially "memma"!). Gunnar made a good effort to substitute my lack of Easterfood though, and offered a GREAT Easter brunch for me, Kim and Erica at Sunday. It's started as a brunch but ended up as dinner - we were kind of eating the whole day!

At Saturday we looked at the world pillow fight day (totally crazy), bought a couple of beer in the park, played a lot of drinking games and hanged out in Maleks apartment, and eventually we ended up in a club where we were dancing to 30's swing music. We also made an unsuccessful try to get in to Berghain, but apparently we were queueing in the gay-line and we didn't realized there were different lines depending on what sexuality you are - felt a little bit weird!

Yesterday me and Emma made an excursion to Grunewalds forest, hiking for a couple of hours, had picnic, found the old nazi-spacestation, a lot of small lakes and finally tree wild boars (vildsvin in swedish). They were enormous! In the evening we went to Neukölln to watch stand up again as last Monday, it's starting to become a tradition.

Today I had my first courses, and one of them is a theater-course. It was really fun, we were doing some improvisation theater, games and icebreakers. They have such fun courses here, I will also study one course called "mindful stress reduction in social work", which sounds like some kind of yoga-thing!

I also just decided I will go to India to do my internship in August! Hard decision! But then I will go to Örebro to participate in the preparation week for that, and since it's close to our blockweek, I will stay in Stockholm in nearly 2 weeks (so you know I'm coming home<3). I will aslo travel to Malta to visit my sister during that time.

So as you notice - my school is quite chill, and I will have a lot of freetime as well. But suits me fine - lazy as I am.

Have a great week,

Puss&Kram

 Eating dinner with my roomie Kquan - thaifood in Tierpark center as usual ;)

 Thay have this weird traditional banana-beer they drink here in Berlin - banana smoothie mixed with Pilsner - urk!

 Pillowfight

 After the pillow fight...

 Easter brunch with Kim, Gunnar and Erica.

 Hot dudes reading ;) (look up the instagram hashtag for that!)

 Grunewald. The view was great!

 They were cute, but so huge!

The boys had to sit behind the stand up comedian ;)

Rökfyllda röriga rum (smokey rooms - but it did sound better in Swedish ;))

Hola!

We have had a lot of fun this week, and now we are really tired, but still forced our selves to write a blogpost since Sara is here and this is the first time in two years we actually write TOGETHER as in old times! :)

We will post some pics here, but we don't have any from all the cozy bars we have been to, so that's sad. But instead we will write about them here:

1. FetteEcke in Kreuzberg. By far the coziest place we have ever experienced! We stayed there for almost 6 hours! They played good music, had a looots of candles all over the place, a lot of happy people in it and some big dogs as well, that walked free in the bar or slept under the tables. Since it's allowed to smoke inside almost all bars and coffeehouses in Berlin, people tend to be more social in the bars while sitting down smoking and chatting. And once you get used to the smoke, it's actually quite charming in some way!

2. Warschauer Strasse. Here you can find a lot of nice bars and clubs, and all of them is quite hippie-places with a lot of graffiti, which makes the bars look more trashed and old, but also gives them a certain feeling. On the other hand, graffiti seems to be the perfekt word to describe Berlin with one word. And once again - the music is good!

3. Partykeller. In Kosmonautenstrasse, where Erica and Carlota and Blai live. (I had to put it in my list since Erica is so keen on it ;)). It's a studentpub where you can party cheap, meet people from all over the world and even dance pole dance if you like ;) It's a fun place to hang out, and it closes late. Or early, depends how you see it.

 Wir möchten Kaffe und Kuchen!<3

 A really nice restaurant we went to together with Kim and Jacob.

 Condomat - only in Berlin!

 My new roomie and her boyfriend, having dinner with us in the Italian restaurant in Tierpark.

 Ana, Sara and Nora.

 Marisa, Mireia and Emma.

 A little gathering in my room - that seems to be bigger than I thought!

 Berlin wall as real turists.

 And then we saw this really wierd "bicykle-car"(?).

 Checkpoint Charlie

 Eating dinner in one of the best Vietnamese restaurants with Gunnar and his sister.

So have a nice monday tomorrow, now we will go to sleep!

Puss och Kram!
Mirjam och Sara.