Randomness

A couple of things I forgot yesterday:

The beggers here are nuts. We met our bike tour yesterday at one of the main squares, and as we were walking this sweet lady who looked like she was from India came up to us. She had the head covering and was holding the hand of a precious little girl. She asked if we spoke English, and when we said yes she handed us a sheet of paper that said something like “I am here from Bosnia with my small child and have no money to eat. Can you please help?” These types of things break my heart. But we told here we had no cash but would say a prayer for her. Well, as we were waiting for the tour w1e were approached at least a dozen times by different women with the same story. They were everywhere, like mosquitos in the summertime! One woman even came up to us while she was breastfeeding! At this point I started thinking it was a scam and stopped feeling bad.

The other thing I forgot was something we learned on our tour. We learned that Berlin is one of the most liberal cities in the world with the highest Turkish population outside of Turkey and the third highest gay population. We also learned that they have a very high percentage of atheists- 50% of its citizens recognize themselves as such. However, we then learned that you are taxed based upon your religious affiliation. The religious pay higher taxes to go towards the rebuilding of religious buildings that were destroyed in the war. We found this very interesting. What if you love God but don’t want your money to go towards buildings? Is that considered renouncing your faith? Some interesting discussion questions if nothing else…any thoughts?

The pub crawl last night started off as fun, though we were ready to go home at the end. We met a bunch of guys from England who were celebrating their buddy’s stag party. They were fun. We weren’t really that impressed with the bars…we went to three bars that were nothing special or different than what we would find in KC. Nothing wrong with them, just nothing exciting. Then we went to two clubs that had crazy lights, people dancing on tables, and loud techno music. Not really our thing, but it was fun to get out and talk to people from around the world.

One funny thing that happened on the pub crawl. Mark was talking to these Canadian guys about where we have been, and he asked them if they’ve ever heard of Baden Baden. They hadn’t. Mark started telling them about how awesome, terrific, and wonderful it is. He says “You just walk around naked, and they massage you, they rub you all over, it is so great!” He goes on and on about it. The Canadian asks if it’s a girl doing the massaging and Mark says “No, it’s a guy, but it’s not weird. It’s so awesome.” Then the Canadian guys started giving Mark weird looks and slowly backed away. Hahaha.

Today is our last day. There’s not another bike tour available today, so I think we’re just going to rent bikes and get around the city on our own. Already started praying that we don’t suffer the same fate that the Air France flight did……