7:00am
I went for a jog/walk through town this morning for about an hour. The air is so clean and clear and it is a beautiful day. I think that I was the only person up in this tiny little village. They must rely pretty heavy on their fireplaces here in the winter as every back yard has piles of firewood stacked up.
It is so quiet here, one of the guys from the team told me that a lot of people from Berlin come here for retreats and I can see why.
I got back to the room around 8:00am, only to find that I can’t get back into the room. After yesterday I can conquer anything so I am not worried about this little problem. I pounded on the door and woke Liam up – hah! He was so confused why I was outside of the room - that will teach him for sleeping when I can’t!
9:30am
Otto the team manager came by the hotel to pick Liam and I up. We just finished our breakfast which was a little different than what I am used to. A continental breakfast that has cereal with warm milk, bread, cheese and cold cuts!?? The cheese and meat seemed to be the most popular.
10:30am
Finally got on track and doing what we came here for. Things went pretty well. The car had a bad understeer but we aren’t here for ultimate lap times, rather just getting Liam some time in the car so he can get used to it before the Hockenheim race next weekend. Liam did about 160kms today which is what the team expected to do but the car had a few issues.
The team made a few changes through the day which they hadn’t planned on doing but helped and Liam learned a bunch about adapting to the car. Liam learned a bunch about carrying too much entry speed and asking too much of the front tires. He ended the day with his fast lap about 4 laps from the end so that was good and the team was happy and we are all looking forward to this weekend. Way to go, Liam...(Ed)
Liam, Henry and I went and had lunch across the street at the rental karting track which was better food than what I have had at karting tracks at home. This place was busy all day long and it has a full blown restaurant at it. I had the schnitzel with a spicy paprika sauce that was very tasty, different but tasty. One of my only complaints so far this trip has to be about the drinks, they don’t use ice here so everything you drink is basically warm.
After lunch Henry took us into Berlin for some sight seeing and boy was that good. I had planned on the two of us going in there but I am sure glad we didn’t try to do that ourselves. It was great to have Henry drive us around and tell us about everything.
The one thing I wanted to do when I found out I was going to be this close to Berlin was to see if there was any of the wall remaining and there is and Henry took us there to see it. It was such a neat thing to see but yet a funny feeling when I saw it. For some strange reason I didn’t want to touch it there is so much history there it was just a weird thing. We got to stand on both sides of the wall which was pretty cool as you couldn’t have done that 20 years or so ago. You could tell that everyone else around there was doing the same thing just to say that they did it also. We got the explanation about the wall and the two different sides and how the one side has always been as they call it “the artist side” with graffiti all over it and political cartoon drawings, and the other side was grey and very clean (now it is all graffiti painted also). After listening to Henry’s story it made me think about the fact that our borders at home are focused on keeping certain people out and here this wall was to keep certain people in!
We saw many sights around the city but only touched the tip of the iceberg and we were in the car the whole time so it was hard to get any good pictures or to really look at some of the sights. 3 hours is really not enough time to go to Berlin to see all the sights, you really need a few days, which only leads me to one thing – I’ll have to come back.
We did get out of the car to walk around a bit so Henry could get some coffee at Starbucks – yes Tracee I got you something - so we could exchange our money. I was able to get the feel of the city a little and I can say I felt totally safe here. At no time did I feel like I had to watch my back at all.
The city has some very modern shops and building mixed in with some extremely old buildings with some amazing history. There seemed to be a lot of construction going on also.
We drove past many “designer” stores and then you have what was called “Checkpoint Charlie” which was a post from "Russian rule to American rule Germany" as Henry called it. Of course now it is a tourist stop and they had fake guards out front that you can have your picture taken with.
Bicycles are everywhere here and they almost rule the road in the city. The cars are very respectful of the bicycles. It seemed like it was mainly women that ride the bikes here so I asked Henry and he said it was because the men make so much fun of the way women drive (...don't try this at home.... Ed) that they choose to ride the bikes instead. I also found out that in Germany it is extremely hard and expensive to get your basic drivers license – it cost Henry over $1000.00 euro to get his license years ago.
I could go on forever about what we saw but I don’t want to bore you and I just can’t describe it well enough to do it justice. I found the history here amazing and this is coming from a guy that couldn’t get out of history class fast enough in school.
One of the funnier things that happened on the trip today was when Henry turned on his navigation unit to go into town. He has downloaded the voice of Adolf Hitler in German in his nav system. It was so loud and mean sounding and then Henry started laughing so I asked him what it said. He said that he had gone past a turn and Hitler told him the he had to "turn around like the Italians!" We all had a good laugh at that, but he had to change the voice as Otto the team manager/owner had told him to before we left since it might offend us to hear them mocking him. ...offend us? Not likely....(Ed)
We got back to the hotel around 7:00pm and we are both beat. My system is still really screwed. In the early afternoon it was everything to keep my eyes open. If it wasn’t for Liam on track I would have curled up in a ball and slept for 10 days.
Tomorrow we drive back towards Frankfurt to meet up with the rest of the VW gang Wednesday morning. We may end up going beyond Frankfurt and on to Heidelberg for the night. We were thinking of going and doing a lap of the Nurbergring but I think that it would be too long of a drive.
That’s all for now back again tomorrow.
