School-Endorsed Drinking and Florida Friends

Earth can seem like a pretty big place, but it isn't.
I have heard stories of people running into other people in the unlikeliest of places. Berlin, while not as unlikely as, say, Tibet, is a rather strange place to bump into someone.
My sister's friend from Elementary school has come to Berlin, on nearly the same day as I have, albeit for a much longer time. This friend I have seen coming and going for years and years, and if you had said that someday I'd meet her for lunch in Berlin I would have been confused at best, and perhaps overreacted and called you a witch.
Yet, this past Friday, I did indeed meet her for lunch.
We met on a subway platform and proceeded to wander around in search of lunch. We were very close to Under Den Linden, a famous street in Berlin with very expensive stores, so cheap food was not abundant. We did, however, find a chocolate store whose name translates to "Colorful Chocolate World." Check http://www.flickr.com/photos/uflinguist/ for pictures (as well as pictures of everything else I am up to here.)
We ended up going a ways away and getting Indian food for lunch. I've noticed that there are absolute tons of Vietnamese and Indian places around Berlin, and very few Chinese places. Many say that they specialize in Oriental food, but it really means (once you look at the menu) it's Vietnamese or maybe Japanese. Anyways, we had a nice meal and then went our separate ways.
After a short rest at home, I left to return to the Goethe Institute to meet up with some others. The Goethe Institute has "cultural activities" after classes often that you can sign up for, and this one had quite a few people sign up for it. I can't recall the German name for it, but it basically equated to a pub crawl.
We met and our guide first boggled at how many people showed up, more than twice as many as the sign-up sheet could accommodate. He then went on for a rather long time about the history of drinks and beer and such in Germany and Berlin (I think, I still can't really understand a lot of what people say, but some people told me the Cliffs Notes later) and where we'd be going. 8 bars, each with a different local flavor and theme and way of doing things. We would not all fit in to each place.
As I suspected, as soon as we got to the first bar, the group splintered. About 25 went into the first bar, where there was a reserved section for us. Some friends and I decided to heck with it, and went to another bar on the list, and spend the evening staying one step ahead of the pack. As soon as a few people we recognized began to trickle in, we would quickly leave and make our way to the next bar.
All in all, a very fun night and certainly not something that a US program would be endorsing for its cultural activities. ;)