Wow, today was absolutely a day.

It started out fine.  Woke up on the later side (9ish,) ate some
breakfast.  Today's goal was to get all of my touristy stuff out of
the way.  I promised a friend back home that I'd get her a piece of
the Berlin Wall (did you know they just sell those?  Like as
souvenirs?) So the going was mostly fine.  I took a bus up to near the
center of the city, I took a little walk from there with a detour or
two, got some matcha.  Checkpoint Charlie was kind of interesting as a
place, got my souvenir, walked around former East Berlin for a moment.
After that I headed west.  Last time I was here I tried like 5 times
to visit the Brandenburg Gate and failed every time.  Mostly the
problem was that (before I got sick,) I was mostly just going on walks
and I could never make it far enough before talks began.  So this time
I got to that, I got a few new shots of the Reichstag,

That's when it got interesting.  Generally speaking Berlin is held up
as one of the best transit systems in the world but *boy* did it fail
me today.  So I started going home.  I took a walk down to
Friedrichstraße's S-Bahn station.  I took it to Ostkreuz.  It was
fine.  Unfortunately the S-bahn has closures, so I believe Ostkreuz is
actually as far as it goes, or somewhere around there at least.

From there I transferred to the platform that Maps told me to.  The
train pulled up when Maps said it would.  I got on.  I looked at the
Next Station indicator at the appropriate time: it was my station!  I
got off the train and looked around, lost.  I needed the southbound
and I'd gotten onto the northbound.  So I needed to wait half an hour
for the southbound to show up.  I went to the platform the station
listing said.  There was an ICE (high speed train) on that platform,
but I figured it'd move to make room for my train since it'd been
there literally since I arrived at the station.  So I keep
waiting.....and my train shows up on another platform.  I run over to
the platform, catch the right train, go to my station, get out.  I
check my phone and the next bus isn't supposed to come for 20 minutes.
Fine, I'll go to a späti and get a drink.  I started walking
down...and the bus passes me.  Fine, I get my drink go down a bit, run
across 4 lanes of traffic (very not-Germany of you,) go down the
street to the bus stop, and wait.  The bus is 15 minutes late and so
packed that there's not even really standing room.  By the time it
gets to my stop it's more like 20-25 minutes late.  I think a lot of
this is because of the S-Bahn closure but still like, come on man.

It was pretty fun after that though.  Went out to dinner, picked up
some snacks and beer, went by a ton of trick or treaters (more than I
see in America!) Now we're setting up to watch movies for the rest of
the night.
.