Happy Bollards, Schwip Schwap & Minge Coffee

We awoke after one of the best sleeps of the trip and tried our luck at the breakfast buffet, which we got for free again, woop! We started our walk the same way as yesteray but decided to walk along the river to the east in order to get a better view of the Molecule Men. We walked past them and further to the east until we found ourselves in a really run down area, with a Lidl smack bang in the middle of nothing. We bought juice and noticed an orange and cola drink named Schwip Schwap. Bizarre. A lot of the surrounding buildings were deliberately wonky, they were very colourful and kind of nice to look at but I can't imagine what they can be used for. We saw a poster for Monkey Island Festival before finding ourselves really quite lost in East East Berlin. John had his trusty map and we were soon back on course (ish).

After having seen dozens of men with accordions on this trip, John has decided he wants to learn how to play one and we both yelped with joy when we passed a musical instrument shop selling them in all shapes and sizes: old ones, miniature ones, childrens ones. There was also a gigantic harmonica that we would have like to buy for Elliot but it would have needed a backpack all on its own it was so big. We discussed the likelihood of being able to find Take That music for the accordion and hoped that someone, somewhere, had the brilliant idea of arranging it for an accordionist.

We came home, packed and re-shuffled our bags around and I re-packed the snowstorms, carefully wrapping them in t-shirts and pillowcases to keep them safe. It was very odd to pack up for the final time knowing that tomorrow would be the end of our adventure. It's exciting to think about unpacking them all in our flat but still weird to come to somewhere that has been home to someone else for 2 months.

I finished the book I had been reading and we went to the common room to find another to pass the time while the weather was miserable outside. We had hoped to meet up with our friend San San while we were in Berlin but both of our phones decide to die on us, so we had no way of contacting her :( one of the guys from our dorm, a posh, camp Australian with glasses and dreadlocks came bounding over to us while we sat on a sofa, while one of his friends collapsed in the one nearest us. The only book I could find in English was about Stone Cold Steve Austin, the WWE wrestler, so I was quite happy to be interrupted by them. They started quoting Invader Zim and I couldn't hide my excitement at finding people who had heard of it, let alone who could quote it! They were equally excited and continued animatedly quoting until the one closest to us fell asleep and the dreadlocked one went to talk to the American headbangers from yesterday.

Although our time here has been short and relatively calm, it was the perfect place to end our perfect adventure.