My last day of the trip, which I am hoping later to write a summary, or synopsis of all of the important life conclusions I learned upon my journeys, but later. As it is, I will only talk about the day, Halloween day. I woke up relatively late, and grateful for the recent ending of Daylight Savings Time, because I would have been late to check out of the hostel otherwise. When I did awaken, I tried to throw all of my stuff together, and take a shower and get breakfast and check out, I was only successful in half of these, but nothing too slim, I showered and got my stuff ready, but missed check out time, and more importantly missed breakfast. Oh well, I did check out about 6 minutes late, but nothing too bad, and after that, I just sat in the lobby of the hostel for a while and wrote my entry for the previous night, stalling as long as possible, because I did not want to leave the hostel and just hang out with my really heavy knapsack on my back, even though I am the happy wanderer. Anyway, I stayed until about 11:00 but finished writing it, and decided I might as well go see Charlottenburg Schloss, or Castle, but this did not actually come to fruition. What instead happened is I thought I would take the scenic tour around Berlin instead of going directly to the Schloss, at least this insured that I had a seat.
On the ring line around the city subway, though it was all above ground I had a rather pleasant time, and just enjoyed feeling the clear day with the sunshine, though it had the feel of a distant Autumn sun rather than the happier summer sun I enjoy so much in Denver. I finally got off at Westend, a station I thought I remembered near Charlottenburg Schloss, and it actually was, but I just kind of wandered off looking more at the west end of Berlin and just enjoying the calm day it was there. I wandered into a grocery store and bought a bag of bite sized snickers bars, and then wandered some more, eventually coming to and sitting in a rather relaxing and quiet cemetery as opposed to any other sort I guess. It was so beautiful there, the trees all around had showered the ground with their golden leaves, and the tombs were all very well maintained and all unique and special, several had neat little statues or things like that, but certainly not ostentatious... some even had little frames of shrubs around the grave itself, which I thought was a neat idea. Anyway, after I had spent an hour here in a cascade of thought and revelry, I thought it was time to get to the airport. So off I went.
When I got there, I was quite early, but I was happier to be in the right place and everything. Tegel was an odd airport in that it was basically a polygon hall. I had to get my ticket at the gate I boarded, but when I did, They said that since I had missed my flight from London to Venice it cleared the rest of my flights and I was not booked per se. Luckily they quickly took care of that and gave me a seat, and soon we were off. I sat next to a nice German lady and we had a long conversation of the academic sort on the ride between Berlin and London (in English fortunately). When we got back, passport control sucked as always but was rather quick and I was on the tubes, they took longer than I wanted, but nothing too bad. I finally got back to the flat and found a load of mail at the doorstep for me, and I was happy to get it, but too overwhelmed with work and everything to really concentrate enough on anything. Anyway, I sat and talked to Seamus and his fiancé, Kirstin who was a rather nice girl, about our respective trips. I also got some stuff done on the internet but what I did not do was my paper, I tried to go and work in my room, but due to its extreme smallness and the amount of stuff that three people occupying it took up, I really had far less room than I would like to admit and it was very filthy. So, I worked in there for a while and tried to clean somewhat to no avail, and then went to bed.