Have you ever heard about blind booking? Let’s say, for example, that you and two more friends of yours want to take a trip somewhere for about…3 days. You don’t know exactly where to go and definitely you are not in the mood of spending too much. You want a cheap trip and lots of fun.

One thing you could try is to blind book your trip. What does it mean? Go the webpage of a flight company that offers this kind of service (I know German Wings does) and see what destinations you could reach from your departure city. For example now, from Berlin, you can blind book a flight to Bucharest, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne, Stockholm or Zagreb. Then choose the flight dates and the number of persons and turn your destination into a lottery, letting the system decide where to go.

If you really don’t want to get Cologne, for example, then you can exclude it from the list, but that would cost you a small extra-fee. You can exclude up to three destinations from the list and so the chances to get to one of your favorite cities are higher.

This kind of booking can be great if you’re looking for something different, no matter what. It’s a bit of fun and a bit of adventure at really affordable prices. If you’re lucky you can get a 25-30 euro round ticket to destinations like London, Barcelona, Roma or Lisbon, all taxes and fees included.

I didn’t blind book a trip until now, because Romanian companies don’t have this option, but now, that I’m in Berlin, I think I would give it a try to see what happens. Anyone else interested?

It was my first Friday in Berlin and I was planning to watch a movie with some friends. As I was new in town, a friend suggested me to watch a movie about Berlin, something to introduce me to the urban Berlin lifestyle. And, as our first B1.2 lesson in Deutsch Akademie was about movies, I thought it would be nice to share this with you.

The movie I want to talk to you about is a comedy released in 2006 and called Schwarze Schafe/Black Sheep. It is a collection of both strange and funny stories whose characters are more or less normal people living more or less normal lives.

First, we meet an Ex Handmodel for Rolex who pretends to get sick in the restaurant of a posh hotel in order to get the most expensive room and seduce the blond gorgeous marketing manager invited for dinner. We also meet two Satanists (one of them wearing a Kelly Family T-shirt haha) that plan to bring Satan’s kingdom back on Earth by performing a weird ritual in which a pig mask and a grandmother in coma are involved. An East-German woman and her drunken boyfriend meet a former schoolmate, now married with a rich man from München, and make a real show on a tourist boat. The Berlin couple ends up in the river, a good pretext to present in a subtle way the mentality differences between Berlin and München.  And, of course, I should not forget the three Turkish boys that try to find some women, but eventually all they find is trouble.

The movie is in German and, at that point, I could only enjoy the English subtitles. But the German friends say the slang language in the movie is totally delicious. Whether you understand German or not, the movie is really fun to see. Especially on a Friday night, with friends.