Just catch you all up...

I left Amsterdam. Was very sad to see it go, because its an amazing city and i met some very cool people there. I took a train to Cologne. Poor Cologne, it never had a chance. The night before I left Amsterdam I stayed up all night talking to an Irish girl called Kim on the couch in the lobby of my hostel, about everything under the sun. And then in order to get to Cologne, I had to get 4 trains, each lasting between 30mins-1 hour. I was so tired, and missing Amsterdam, and then I got off at the wrong station in Cologne and had to walk for two hours in the rain. To find that my hostel was right next to the train station I failed to get off at and my room was right next to the tracks. No sleepytime for Jess. Needless to say it wasn´t the most fun I´ve had here so far. But I took a long walk around the city the next day, and i think maybe if I ever went there again I wouldn´t hate it. Maybe.

My train to Berlin was a lot easier, and my hostel easy to find. However, i arrived to find my room was in the basement of the hostel, and there were 29 other people in it. I have since moved to a hostel on a boat on the river Spree next to O2 World, a huge ugly concert hall in the middle of avant-garde Freidrichshain and Kreuzberg. But I am less than 50 metres away from the East Side Gallery, the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. I´ve been on quite a few tours of Berlin while I´ve been here, and I´m picking up little bits of German, which is cool. I find it fun to try and translate things I have no business translating, and imagine they say weird and wonderful things when in reality its more like `fish and cheese´or something like that. On Sunday I woke up to find that the huge Fete de la Musique was on, a giant free festival with performances all throughout Berlin. I ended up participating in an experiential performance art kinda thing involving lots of paper hearts and LOVE for everybody, run by this artist called Oliver, and spending the day with some German uni students writing on Oliver´s installation-poster and listening to very good music played by an indie rock band, a gypsy band and a plain rock band near a little cafe in a park in Kreuzberg. Lots of fun.

While I´ve been here I´ve eating so many felafel kebabs its insane. That and Vietnamese noodles. They are very cheap here, and there are stalls everywhere that make the felafel fresh in front of you. Anyway, I´m planning to go to a music and theatre festival near Berlin this week called Fusion, which sounds like it should be awesome.