To me, Berlin is a great city. Walks about the canal, lots of public transit, and döner kebap make up a lot of experience, but there really is a whole entire world within the city limits. I’ve had quite the amazing time. Berlin is nice because it has a bunch of surprises for me every day.
For instance, I left the hotel one day to go to the nearby Kaiser’s, and to my surprise there was some type of rollerblading parade going on in the nearby street.
Back home in New Jersey, I can jaywalk and not a soul cares, while in Berlin the other pedestrians look at me funny and cars accelerate to startle me. In restaurants, probably over half of the dialogue between the waiter and me is saying the word bitte (please in English) to each other because I’m not quite sure about its proper use in a service sense. I’ve also heard that Germans pride themselves on their punctuality, and while the U-Bahn and S-Bahn run pretty smooth, the yellow double deckers are sometimes so late that the next bus catches up to the current one, so that two buses arrive at the same exact time, and so it’s always a gamble to trust the buses. Also, since finding a coin counting machine in Berlin is a myth, the store patrons often count out their change for a solid minute or two, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in the US.
Specifically, the university system looks different to me as well. At NU for example, the campus is definitely a dedicated college campus, with the library not too far from the student center, which is also not too far from the gym, and classrooms are scattered all between these things. In Berlin, I’m not even positive if Humboldt has a student center. The buildings we had class in were basically indistinguishable from all the other buildings around them that weren’t owned by the university, and I never saw students going into a designated dorm building. Attending college in Berlin is definitely not the same as moving into Elder Hall at Northwestern.
On an ending note, Berlin is really cool to me because it has all the familiar aspects of the United States and home, but it has enough rough edges of cultural and societal norms to keep me enamored.