I started the day slowly. The sudden
inclusion of exercise into my live has taken its toll on me and I’ve started to
feel tired the majority of the time. I rested, slowly got myself together:
getting dressed and such. After a while I went upstairs and A and I had our
first proper English lesson together. Basically she wanted to go through a book
of phrasal verbs and have me explain their meanings and give her some examples.
For the first lesson it went pretty smoothly; I had been worried about how they
would pan out.
At around 2pm, and when the lesson had more
or less fizzled out, I got a text from Redditor D, asking if I wanted to go to some sort of plane
museum. Now, I don’t know if this makes me a typical girl, but I can’t say planes
are really my thing, but being social and having more time to solidify a
friendship is, so I said I would love to go.
I had to get ready at a serious speed,
throwing make up on, stuffing my bag full and racing from the house.
We met in Charlottenburg and Redditor S
told us we would have to get an hours bus to the museum. It was already 4pm by
this time, but I kept quiet, I’m trying out this whole spontaneous go with the
flow approach (completely against my nature). We walked to the bus stop,
getting pizza on the way. At the bus stop we tried to look for times and
couldn’t find any. I was keeping an eye on the time. It hit half 4, and we knew
the museum would close at 6, giving us only half an hour once we were there. I
couldn’t help myself; my organisational nature kicked in. I suggested we do
something else instead and go to the museum another day. It turned out this was
a good suggestion as we realised moments later that there was a message saying
there were delays to the bus line, so it might have never even come!
Instead we got back on a train and headed back around the city (turned out to be right beside where I’m staying in
Berlin!) and to something Redditor S suggested. He had explained it was a
labyrinth. Now to me that said some big outside maze that we would go around
together and it could be quite fun. I guess I didn’t hear the, it’s a bar, part.
It turned out to be this weird bar that
played strange noises and music, was small and dark with creepy artwork and
objects on the walls. We queued up to pay to go in the labyrinth, but I was
already getting a faint, panicky feeling. I felt like I was hyperventilating, I
couldn’t quite get enough air into my lungs and it was making me light headed.
I voiced my concerns but the boys reassured me that it was meant to be fun and
interesting, and not a horror maze. I finally agreed to still go ahead with it,
thinking, at least they’ll be there with me and can help if I panic. So we paid
and were told there would be half an hours wait, so we got drinks. I was still
panicky and so when I got to the bar I slipped into my old ways. I’m not very
good at ordering things, even in England, because I never know what to ask for.
In the end I just got a coke because it was easiest, but that meant I was still
on a panicked edge when we sat down.
I managed to calm down a little, enough to
relax and take part in conversation with two Canadian boys we had met. After a
while though, one of the owners of the bar came to collect someone close by us
to enter the labyrinth, and that’s when I saw the blindfold. The boy was lead
off, alone, separated from his group. I turned to the others. We would have to
go in alone.
The panic came back, worse this time. I
couldn’t do it alone, what if I had a panic attack? I can’t speak German, what
if I got lost and panicked and couldn’t find or speak to someone to help me?
Nope, not doing it.
Redditor S went with me to get a refund,
and although I did get one, the manager of the bar made it stupidly difficult.
He asked me to explain why I was scared, and instead of reassuring me he
belittled my fears, made out I was being ridiculous and kept saying how much of
a shame it was I wasn’t going to do it. I don’t care if it’s a shame! I
thought. I had already pushed myself so far on this trip, and this would be one
step too much.
I waited 40 minutes while the boys did the
maze, sitting in front of a fire drinking my coke and Facebooking my boyfriend.
Redditor D came back first, oddly since he went in later than Redditor S. He
told me all about it. Basically it was a maze of rooms and tunnels all of which
were designed in ways to confuse the senses, including: pitched black rooms,
tunnels you crawl along and they get smaller, a room designed to look like a
vagina and all sorts of other noises and smells pumped into rooms and weird
feeling things on the walls and floor. I knew immediately I would have
completely hated everything about it, I’ve never been so glad to chicken out of
something.
Redditor S emerged long after we had come
up with various explanations for his disappearance; completely lost, drugs, death.
It turned out he had met a group of girls in the maze and wanted to go for food
with them. I’m not very good with girls, it just takes me longer to feel
comfortable with them and be able to talk to them, so I decided to head home. It
turned out we ended up right at the end of my street so it was an easy walk
home. I didn’t feel so good though.
This was my first pang of homesickness
since I got here. I missed my boyfriend terribly, so we Skyped and it helped.
In the end I was glad I spent more time with the people I had met on Tuesday,
but perhaps I should try have more input in where we go.
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