i keep a diary

February 06, 2005

Baltic Vacation Part 06 Adventure in the Tropics

...the cliffhanger is resoved!

On Sunday we work up around 1pm to discover that Brandon, the guy from Budapest by way of San Francisco, that we'd met upin Berlin after becoming friends over the internet, was, in fact, a normal person (collective sigh of relief)!

If you recall from the last entry, we'd met up with Brandon late the previous night for the very first time and he was acting so crazy that we were starting to worry about whether or not this was a guy that we could stand having as our tour guide for the next week.

Now sober, "Normal Brandon" explained to us that he'd started drinking at around 8pm the previous night figuring that he'd be in the perfect "party zone" to greet us when we arrived around 11ish. But between our plane being delayed and us getting horribly lost on the way over, we didn't end up making it to Ferdinand's (Brandon's friend) house until almost 2am and by that time Brandon was completely shit-canned (or at least that was his excuse for why he spend the entire first night we met him talking in an accent like Borat from Ali G and not even breaking character once! Hahaha). Ok, on with our day!

Sunday, February 6th

So our big plan for the day was to take a train about 80 km minutes southeast of Berlin to visit an "indoor tropical resort" called "Tropical Islands" that Grant wanted to write a travel piece about for a NYC-based magazine. Get this: An Indonesian billionaire heard that a German manufacturer of enormous cargo zeppelins was going out of business and decided to he wanted to turn their manufacturing facility (which is the largest self-supported structure in the world) into a clima-controlled recreation of a tropical island!.

Tropical Islands is in a dome that is 1180' long, 688' wide (that's over 811,000 square feet of floor space!) and 351' tall (which according to their web site means the building could house the Statue of Liberty standing upright or the Eiffel Tower laying down). The place is filled with pools, waterfalls, sand, over 500 species of tropical plants and trees, is kept at a constant temperature of 83°F, and stays open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. How insane does all this sound?.

The guy spent hundreds of millions of his dollars gambling that Germans would take a train to this giant stadium to escape their winters instead of hopping on a plane and going to real tropical island. The place had just opened a few weeks ago and we were really curious to see if it had caught on yet.

Our quick internet research at Ferdinand's house led us to believe that we'd have to take a bus to some far train station on the outskirts of Berlin. So we hopped on the subway to seek out the bus stop that we needed.
Check out the font on the tiled wall that they use to write all the names of the subway stops. Grant saw it and was like "I can't believe they still use that font! Don't they know that everyone else thinks of it as the Nazi font?" Now check out Brandon and Grant in the reflection. Emo? Or just plain hung over?
Definitely emo.
Apparently, this is where we needed to be to find the bus.
We got off at the station, and wandered around the neighborhood looking for the bus station. After a fruitless hour of wandering in the cold, confusing the natives by our probably-offensive attempts to ask questions in German ("Ja, hallo! Ver ist die autobus station? Die grosse Tropical Island?"), we decided to give up. I don't know which I was angrier about: that fact that we had such a half-ass plan or that it turns out that Frau Barke, my 9th grade German teacher who totally hated me was correct about me one day regretting the fact that I didn't pay attention in her stupid German class.
Instead, we decided to head to Potsdamer and check out some of the famous stuff in Berlin.
Like the Berlin Wall!
I always imagined it would be bigger. I guess it's a big deal and all but I can't understand why all the Germans just didn't walk around it.
Those wacky Germans, they're obedient to a fault. Speaking of German obedience, that brings us to our next tourist attraction...
...the new Holocaust Memorial they're building!
While they're not so great at questioning authority (I write this as our own half-witted president gleefully and indiscriminately drops bombs on brown people everywhere. So, irony noted), one thing Germans are great at is being totally direct and literal. Germans do not mince words. For example, in English we'd call this the German Holocaust Memorial. The literal translation of what it's called in German is: "Donation Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe."(For reals.)
Here's what the architect who designed the memorial said about it: "the enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate ... The memorial attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia ... We can only know the past today through a manifestation in the present."

Each of the granite cubes looks like a tombstone, and the effect of all 2,700 of them sprawling over the acres made me think of a the biggest graveyard I'd ever seen. Pretty powerful schtuff.
On a lighter note, hey look! Cranes!
Berlin is a beautiful city with the most beautiful trash cans I've ever seen.
If I lived there, I so wouldn't be a Verizon customer.
The Brandenburg Gate!
The statue on top of the gate is a sculpture called the "Quadriga." In 1806, Napoleon stole this shit and brought it back to Paris with him. (How fucking hardcore is that?) It 1814, after the wars were over, the Prussians (Berlin was part of Prussia back then) brought it back and put it back on top of the gate. Insanity.
Can you feel the history?
Speaking of famous, historical spots - here's the balcony where Michael Jackson dangled his baby from.
Hey Frank! Check it out, it's Dunkin Donuts in Berlin! It's just like Dunkin Donuts here except that it's IN GERMANY!
We stopped to get our motherfucking Currywurst (pronounced "VURST!") on.
Mmmmmmm. But it was just really to warm ourselves up for another...
...Doner Kabob. We sat in the doner kabob place for a while, ate and had a few beers and tried to figure out an alternate plan for making the trip out to Tropical Islands. After a quick review of our budget, we decided that we probably had enough wiggle room to...
...rent a car and drive out to Tropical Islands!
While we didn't get this one...
...we did manage to score a brand new BMW 550i! Who the fuck rents a car like this to a group of kids like us for about $100?
Six-speed standard shift. 320 horsepower V8. 0-60mph in 5.5 seconds.
Guess who got to drive?
Awwwww, yeah.
We couldn't figure out how to make our car sprechen sie English and it ended up taking us longer to enter our destination into the car's navigation system than it did to actually drive there. But that's mostly because we got to drive on the A13. Do you know what the "A" in "A13" stands for?
That's right, the motherfucking Autobahn. I took this picture to commemorate the first time I'd legally broken the 100mph mark (181 kpm = 100 mph).
This is an actual German road sign. It means "the speed limit no longer applies." Amazing.
Around 9pm (less than an hour later after leaving Berlin), we'd arrived at Tropical Islands! Despite having a GPS navigation system, the place was in the middle of nowhere and took us forever to find!
The building was mammoth.
Here's what you see right when you walk in.
When we walked 200 yards towards the entrance gate and the back of the place didn't seem to get any closer, we started to understand just how big the place is.
The entrance gate.
A Thai-inspired restaurant at the end. (Keep in mind, the peak of this restaurant's roof is three stories high).
See how high the ceiling is? So insane
Heated swimming lagoons.
Real trees and plants everywhere.
And even a giant paper "moon" that rose and fell in the sky as the hours passed.
Now, there's not going to be too much of a narrative here so I'll just post a bunch of the pics I snapped as I walked around and explored the place.
Lifeguard hut!
Another pool.
on the other side of the place, there was a party beach! The place had a huge sound system, a light show and a dancing platform in the middle of the pool.
Bananas.
The view of the "party side" from the back corner.
Check out the stairs that come up out of the water and lead to the mid-pool dance platform!
Where ist das party?
Jake's pictures of Grant swimming.
Hahaha.
The paper moon low on the horizon.
On the way to the bathroom, I stopped periodically to take pictures. I was snapping a few pics in this long orange hallway when this big, chubby German guy came over to me and demanded (first in German, then in perfect English!) that I delete the picture I took of him. I told him I was taking a picture of the hallway, not him. He insisted I had and asked me to show him. So instead of showing him the last picture I'd taken (that did have him in it), I hit the "Jump" button on my camera and showed him a picture several back that he wasn't in. I'm guessing he was worried that I'd post a picture of his large man-boobs on the internet. And if someone doesn't want their man-boobs displayed for the whole world to see...
...you should respect their wishes.
Back to more pictures of the place!
Oooooh!
A closer examination of the "moon" revealed it to be a giant hot-air balloon.
Me snoozing.
Jake was kind enough to burn me a CD of all the photos he took on the trip so that I could use them to help retell our trip. Too bad about one third of the 329 photos he took were of himself making this "winking" face...
...and/or "pretending to yell." Thanks Jake!
When Brandon fell asleep in a lounger around 3am and...
...Grant pointed out that if Brandon hadn't turned out to be a normal guy that we were excited to have as our tour guide, this would've been THE PERFECT opportunity to ditch him. Hahahah.
More pictures of the party side with the paper moon and beach.
I forgot to mention, the place was practically empty. I don't know if it was because it was brand new, or because we were there late on a Sunday night, but something tells me that Tropical Islands isn't going to be around that much longer.
Around 3am, we decided to get something to eat (Brandon wanted to keep napping).
Catch the Giant!
At 4:30am, we decided to grab our stuff in the locker rooms and head out.
We had to drive back to Berlin, pick up our bags at Ferdinand's apartment, drive to the airport, drop off our rental car and catch a 10:30am flight to Budapest, Hungary!
-8°C = 17°F = Our dope rental car covered in frost.
Pretty!
We made it back to Ferdinand's apartment at around 6:30am only to realize that we'd forgotten our key. Which meant that we had to stand outside ringing the bell over and over until we woke somebody up and they came down to let us in. I think Jake's expression pretty much sums up how this made us feel...
...hahahah. Douche Chills!
I don't know if you know this, but Germany is famous (at least in my mind) for its fascination with feces. This immediately becomes apparent when you see a German toilet. Rather than a large bowl of water, German toilets have a flat shelf that you poop onto! It's sole purpose is to give the pooper a chance to better examine what they've just produced!

In jest, we decided that this platform was called the "Platzfürscheiße" ("place for shit") and were shocked to later find out that we weren't all that far off!
This type of toilet is actually called a "Flachspueler" (Flat flusher). If this diagram hasn't helped you understand what I'm talking about, maybe this next picture will help clear things up...
...Booyah! Let's hear it for the shit-shelf! Hahaha.
After rounding up all of our bags at Ferdinand's (and taking an impressive shit!), we packed up the car and headed for the airport. Noting that we were running ahead of schedule, we decided to take a detour and drive around through the industrial outskirts of Berlin where great portions of the Berlin wall remain intact.
Here's the four of us posing in front of The Wall (using our $90k rental car as a tripod for my camera).
Seeing that we still had time, we decided to take picture of ourselves leaning against the wall and looking tough.
Tough as nails! Too bad none of use could manage to...
...keep a straight face for more than three seconds.
Jake's tough face.
Hahaha.
My tough face.
Hahah.
While the roof of our super-expensive rental car worked great as a tripod for my 1lb camera, Grant points out that it did not make an excellent "step ladder" so that 150lb "Jake the Idiot" could try to see over top of the Berlin Wall.
This photo probably explains best why you should be able to rent a $90k car for a little more than $100 a day.
Horrified Grant!
While I usually manage to capture a lot of "action shots" I missed capturing Jake "accidentally" kicking Grant in the mouth while doing a jump kick.
I did, however, manage to capture approximately 30 frames or so of Grant freaking the fuck out and pummeling an apologetic Jake.
Hahahaha. Grant felt that Jake's apology came more out of not wanting to be hit than it did out of genuine remorse.
So when Jake fell asleep with his mouth open in the car on the way to the airport, Grant asked me to hand him back my camera and exacted out some old school retribution.
Wait, what's the that Grant's about to drop into Jake's mouth?
It's one of Grant's boogers!
Jake's gaping, booger-receptacle awaits!
Release the booger!
Grant released the booger, but instead of falling into Jake's mouth as planned, it landed on Jake's bottom lip. Which was somehow, even funnier. If you look carefully, you can see the booger perched there. Just waiting for him to wake up and lick his lips. Hahahaha.
The rising sun coming through the window even made for artsy "booger on lip" shots.
We made it to the plane without event (and Jake none the wiser about the whole booger thing). Next stop, Budapest!