16 June 2010 - Berlin, day 1

18 June 2010, 5:30 PM Central European Time (CET) (12:30 PM EST)

This was the day that Mark and I decided to sleep in late. I think we ended up getting out of bed around 11 AM or so. After a slow morning/afternoon, we set out to check out some of the places that Pac had recommended.

First we went to the East Side Gallery, which was incredibly cool. Basically, it is a part of the Berlin Wall that is still standing that, in 1990 (and then again in 2009), they invited over 100 artists to come and paint. It is so well done and I really loved a lot of the paintings.

From there, we took the S-Bahn over to Alexanderplatz, one of the big tourist destinations. It’s a cool square that has some beautiful churches, the Statehouse, and some ugly, tall structure. Everything we wanted to go in was closed, so we decided that it would be our first stop the following day.

It was already getting to be about time to meet Pac and some other yo-yoers in some park. So, we headed over there, ran into Pac at one of the U-Bahn stations we were at, and went to the Burnin Berlin Yo-Yo Club meet. I have been teaching Mark to yo-yo here and there, so he’s got some pretty decent tricks under his belt. The meet consisted of us hanging out, drinking beers, yo-yoing with Pac, Axl (“the freak”), JK (a really awesome yo-yoer that I snagged some footage of), Bau, Lars, Lars’s girlfriend whose name I cant remember but who taught me some contact juggling, Anna (Pac’s neighbor), Karolina, etc.

It started getting late, so Mark headed back to Pac’s place. I started juggling with Karolina. She taught me some awesome 4 and 5 club passing stuff. The 4 club one was one that I had seen Emil and Eric Girardi do that I had really wanted to learn, so it was cool that it just happened to be the first thing that she taught me.

We ended getting kicked out of where we were hanging out (because it was getting late, not because we were being jerks) so we all headed down to the pond in the park and just hung out and talked as people slowly filtered out. Pac, Karolina, Anna, and I left after a while. It was such a great night and really helped seal the deal of my heart being in Berlin. It’s such a cool place, it’s so relaxed, and the people are so friendly and just generally awesome. At the end of the night, even though I was still there, I was already trying to figure out how I could make it back in the next couple of years.

And I don’t think I would have felt this way nearly as much if it weren’t for Pac. He is so unbelievably kind, generous, and fun to be around. The people he hangs out with are good people and I feel honored to have been lucky enough to be able to stay with him and hang out with him and his friends. I really don’t know how to put into words how at home he helped both Mark and I feel and overall, how awesome he is. Pac, thank you so much.

     Check out photos from this day: here.

Written on a train from Berlin to Prague, where we’ll be studying at FAMU for a month.

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