May 16: Leaving the United States.
Departed Orlando at 11 a.m., changed flights in Atlanta and headed towards Amsterdam and then Berlin. Pretty painless for the amount of time I was travelling, I didn’t lose my baggage or anything stressful. The 8-hour flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam was relaxing; I watched Life of Pi and Silver Linings Playbook and napped briefly.
May 17: Arrival
I arrived in Amsterdam around 5:45 a.m., although in my Eastern time-zone brain it still felt like 11:45 p.m. I got my passport stamped for the first time ever as it slowly set in that I was in a different continent. My layover was just an hour so I only had time to buy some Haribo gummy bears before getting on my final flight to Berlin. I sat with a lively group of Dutch people who made me feel stupid because they could speak my language but I couldn’t speak theirs. I arrived in Berlin around 8 a.m. local time and enjoyed my first legal beer at Tegelbar while I waited for my professor to arrive. I was pretty much lost until I ran into Megan, another UF student in my photojournalism class. We drank and waited until we realized that we were paying too much for beer and our professor’s flight had been delayed. We decided to try to take public transit and find the hotel ourselves. The lack of sleep and hygiene had begun to set in as we tried to navigate unfamiliar territory. We eventually found our hotel and were relieved to finally put away our luggage when we met up with two more students who refused to let us nap. We walked around and stumbled upon a quaint cemetery filled with war heroes and mausoleums. We returned to the hotel around 3:30 p.m. to relax before our official activities began at 5 p.m. This was a mistake. My roommate had not arrived yet so I was alone in my room and I could no longer fight the lack of sleep. I woke up at 7:45 p.m. and began to freak out. I knew the group went to Prater Biergarten and with the help of the man at the front desk I found it. Luckily I found the group just as they were leaving to get ice cream, an excellent first impression. We went back to the hotel as we all began to get to know each other better. As we faced the fact that it was still the afternoon in our heads, we decided to go out and get a few drinks at a local restaurant. My roommate Edmund arrived just in time to join us at about 11 p.m. We returned around 1 a.m. and I finally went to sleep.
Photojournalism in Berlin 2013 