My first Day in Berlin

I am traveling with a colleague of mine, Paz. She kept my sanity for the flight. We arrive in Berlin and take about 20 minutes trying to exchange our currency. We met a German guy on the plane that was very sweet and helped us. We took public transportation to Free University (where we will be studying). Little did we know what kind of adventure we would have.
I was warned that Europe had few escalators, but what I did not know what that there are multiple stairs up AND down just to get to one station. We buy a bus ticket and take it to the subway. We had met about 8 other students on our flight, so we naturally all stuck together. So imagine 8 confused Americans with huge bags of luggage scrambling down to the subway station. We get down but then realize there are is one flight of stairs up top get to the specific train we needed. So for one stop we had to go up and down flights of stairs! Who designed this?? We had to transfer 3 times to get to our destination, and every transfer point had this design. We arrive at the university: sweaty, delirious, sleep deprived, hungry, and jet lagged. Paz and I estimated that the past 36 hours we had only 2 hours of sleep. Then we were shoved in Berlin public transportation and had to carry 100 plus pounds across the city.
We check in and start meeting members of the program. We had some time to kill, so we decided to go to Das Schloss, a shopping center not too far away. We tried to get a cell phone but the service clerk knew very little English. "Wir kommen aus Amerika", I explained (We come from America). And he laughed at our broken German. Not deciding which cell plan was best for us, we decided to try and get cash Euros because very few places accept debit card. We decided to wait on the phone until we could get more assistance or ask our host families.
Om our way back to Free University, Paz and I were about ready to collapse with exhaustion. We had been traveling for 17 hours, and just made fools of ourselves on the first day. We see a corner store and decide to take advantage of our now legal drinking age.

The woman who sold us our beers was very nice and taught us a few useful colloquial phrases. Paz and I sat outside the store and enjoyed our 1 Euro beer. It was refreshing to know that there were sweet people in Berlin, despite that we had been receiving dirty looks all day as we spoke English all the way from the airport and tried communicating in poor German.

A very exhausted Christina with her German beer