Happy New Year, How I Started Off 2014 with a BANG!!!

Well another year has past away from us. Over my life I've had many new years traditions; when I was in middle school my tradition was to attend Winter Jam, a huge concert with my youth group, in high school we had bonfires in the back field and enjoyed the company of friends and family. This year I decided to spend my New Years in Berlin, the capitol of Germany, on the Brandenburg Tor.

Lets start at the beginning tho, I left Sunday morning to catch my train to Berlin. 3 hours, almost missing two transfers, and 200 pages of The Game of Thrones (why I almost missed the transfers) later, I pulled into the main station. Andreas had helped me with the basic planning, including finding me a room for the weekend, Thanks again!!! I was soon at Ushi and Ludwig Blaack's house (host aunt and uncle), they greeted me with open arms and home. I am always surprised at the Gastfruendschaft (hospitality) I receive.  They offered me the home office that use to be their daughters room when she was younger. Over dinner they invited me to come along to the church for a sing-a-long, although I think they where more than surprised when I gladly agreed. The concert was great, a little hard to fallow being as there were very few songs I recognized.

The next morning I was up early to try to meet with some of the other PPP'lers that where in Berlin. I sent my texts and headed for the Hbf, I figured the group wasn't up as early as I was so I headed to see some nearby sights that I figured they had already seen. After I grabbed lunch, I met Sam (Alaska), Shawn, Ryan, Victoria, and Haley at the Dunken Doughnuts to get an american fix.

We did some sight seeing and a few Museums through the day.

Brandenburg tor

US Embessy

Checkpoint Charlie 

Me next to a piece of Berlin Wall

Ryan in a Trabant

Mining Metals

Prize stamps 

Ampe man beer- tasted like Jolly Ranchers

World time clock

Victory Column
















The next night was new years eve and I completely forgot to take pictures of it.. sadly. We went by the Brandenburg Tor, equivalent of time square, and saw the amount of people. So we decided to go spent the evening somewhere nearby so we could hear the music and see the fireworks but weren't caught in the cattle craw.

Sam(Alaska), Shawn, Haley, Victoria, Ryan, Mike Maclaferty, Mike Haupt, Dawn, Kwazi, Bri, Katherine, Zack, Nancy, and probly some others that I forgot (trying to track down a group photo.) where all there to celebrate the new year with me.

I should mention from approx 8 pm the night before up until 8 am the next morning Berlin sounded like a war zone. Germans are Not allowed to have private fireworks except on new years and they take advantage of it. I wish I had a picture of the place in front of the train station. When I was walking across it at 2 am, the ground crunched from packaging, mortar tubes, scorch marks and black shattered glass. They fired enough bottle rockets from these bottles they would explode.

Ended the adventure with a stopover in Bremen to visit josh for a couple days, and then headed for the comfort of my own bed.

Yesterday I pretty well finished reading the second half of my book and that was it. And today I went with Andreas to a soccer tournament, I think he said it had started with 149 teams and we watched most of the semi-finals.

A wonderful new year to you all,

Cody A. Glick