*Disclaimer – this post was written in two chunks.

I landed in Berlin about two hours ago, and I’m at my host family’s house getting settled in. My trip was, overall, fairly uneventful. The only thing that stressed me out was that my flight to Dublin was delayed for about 30 minutes, and I was afraid I was going to miss my connection to Berlin. I was getting antsy as the window of time between my two flights shrank, but thankfully, I got off the plane and to my gate with about 20 minutes to spare. The Dublin airport is actually quite pretty, something I would’ve relished more, had I not been crunched for time.

Landing in Berlin, I was in Terminal C, and my arrival instructions only gave directions for landing in Terminal A and B, so I panicked a bit there, but eventually found where I was supposed to go. I found out that there are only three students total (me included) participating in the Humboldt program this summer. The other two students are doing double summer sessions, so they’ve been in Berlin for a month already. I’ll be meeting them in the next day or two. Since the other two students are already here, I was the only arrival today, so we (the API guy, Claudio, and I) were out of the airport pretty quickly.

It was a short drive to my host family’s house in Zehlendorf, and most of the drive was through a beautiful forest. I didn’t get a picture today, but I’m sure I’ll get one later on. My host family lives in a townhouse on a quiet street. It’s a very picturesque area. The house itself is on the smaller side, but the backyard and garden totally makes up for it. My bedroom window looks out over the backyard, so I’ve got a good view.

The rest of the day was spent getting acclimated to the city, so Claudio and I took the U-Bahn to middle of Berlin. We ate lunch at a little cafe, and this cafe is special because it’s open 24/7, which is quite uncommon. Afterwards, we hopped on a bus that goes past all the tourist attractions, which worked out well because it started to rain a bit. We got off the bus in the area of the city where all the embassies are, and we saw the Bundestag and Angela Merkel’s office and the German version of the White House. I’d walked past all these places when I came here a few years ago, but it was nice to learn about them this time. We also walked by the Fernsehturm and to Alexanderplatz. Afterwards, we took a bus to the Hauptbahnhof, where we got on the U-Bahn back to my host family’s house. On the way back, our train broke down and the barely intelligible man on the PA system told us we had to get off and wait for the next one. (What a great welcome into Berlin!) The next one came relatively quickly, and it was smooth sailing all the way back to the family’s house.

I’m running on over 24 hours of no sleep, so I am looking forward to five hours from now when I can actually go to sleep without running the risk of waking up at 3:00am. The next few days are going to be jam packed with information, so I’ll need all the sleep I can get.