Catching Raindrops

**Hey so my laptop just decided that it would be okay if it started charging again so you all get the posts that have been on here for the last couple of days!  This post was written by me (Matt) and the one below it by Christine, so please go ahead and read both if you have the time and just remember they were written last weekend.  More posts and pictures and things will be forthcoming so bear with us while my laptop returns to life!**

First of all, an apology. We never did get around to writing a post about Prague because we were simply enjoying it too much to take the time. Don't worry, a time will soon come for that. At this moment though we are lying in a green field outside of Berlin, reading books, listening to music, and generally enjoying living.

Getting here was quite a journey. We knew only generally where this music festival was going to be, but very little of how to get there or what we would then do was clear. We spent the night before our train left on the painfully slow computers of the Little Quarter Hostel in Prague doing our best to decipher the transportation directions. Directions, I should point out, that could only be found in German. Needless to say, the night before we left Prague I had some slight reservations about how the next day's journey would progress.

We jumped on a train from Prague to Berlin, about a five hour journey, and found ourselves in the main train station of that same city. I wish I had pictures to demonstrate, but this station is bigger than many airports and busier still. With only a vague idea of our destination, a town called Brieslang, we approached an electronic ticket terminal and apprehensively picked the English option. This was actually incredibly easily and we found a train going right where we wanted leaving in less than half an hour. Things went so well in fact that we purchased our ticket to Paris and we aren't even going there for another two weeks.

We caught our train, found our stop about half an hour later, and even found the shuttle stop that was supposed to take festival-goers to the grounds some six miles away. At this time we really thought we were some hot shit. Everything that we had figured out as we went worked out perfectly. All we had to do was catch this shuttle that was there specifically to get people from this very train stop(about fifty people in all) to the festival grounds. Easy-peazy we thought, there is a festival official, everything looked in order, this day had been a total slam dunk! Except the shuttle never arrived. We were initially told to just call a cab, but it turns out there was only one taxi for the entire town sooo... I still don't know what happened to it, but hey, we saw this cool sunset while we waited!

Eventually they got a bus out to us, we found the festival grounds before it got dark and were able to pitch our tent and catch some sleep. That was two nights ago and the time in between has been incredible. There has been awesome music, (mostly) awesome weather, and generally a very relaxed atmosphere. Last night we got to see one of my most favorite bands, Gogol Bordello. They sang, they played, they ran all over the stage and the crowd loved this unique music which can only be described as gypsy-punk. It was incredible.

Something about this place is magical. I write this from the ground of my tent as I watch the clouds float past out of the door. On the other side of a grove of trees to my left are several stages from which we can hear all types of music. All around me is a giant tent city with people milling about and generally enjoying a really nice weekend. People sleep in the grass, do more or less as they like, and everyone seems to get along quite famously. Oh, and the food is so much better than any sort of concert or festival I've ever seen in the states. It has made a great resting point after all the wonder of Amsterdam and Prague. By the time anybody reads this it will be two days from now and we will be in Berlin and hopefully knee-deep in our next adventure.

And so, to those of you half-way around the world, I implore you to do one thing for me. It matters not if you do it today or tomorrow, but someday take a second to slow down and catch a raindrop :)