home from berlin and on to paris!

Well I've been quite behind in posting. The week of my last post was filled with massive amounts of prepping to go to Berlin, last minute homework assignments and grad school stuff. And then there was the actual trip:

Let's see, we left at the CRACK of dawn on Tuesday. Well actually, we left by 7am and the sun didn't rise for at least another hour, so I guess technically we left before dawn. The bus ride was about 8 hours long with a couple of stops in between for lunch and snacks. When we got in Tuesday night to our hostel I was more than ready to get out of our double decker bus and wander around town a bit. We made it to the Sony Center and Potsdamer Platz which was only a 15 minute walk from the hostel, we drank some coffee, and headed back to go to bed.

Wednesday we got up dark and early to get back on our bus for a driving tour of Berlin. We saw a lot of cool things, but after awhile the bus was very warm and had that nice rocking sensation, so it was very tempting to fall asleep. Luckily we got out at several locations and were able to walk around. This is when we got to see the Victory Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial, and Checkpoint Charlie. Don't worry, I took tons of pictures and I'll post the links to those! Later that afternoon we had a guided tour of the Reichstag which is the Parliament building. We got to see the huge room where they actually sit in session, and then walk up the huge glass dome that's at the top of the building where we got an awesome view of the city. We went out later for coffee at the same little shop we were for the first night just because it was so darn good. Luckily both breakfast and dinner were supplied by the hostel like a mini cafeteria, so we only had to worry about feeding ourselves lunch. And if you ate a lot for breakfast and dinner, sometimes you could just skate right on through :) (I know my mother is cringing.)

Thursday we had the option of seeing one of three museums, the Pergamon, the Jewish History, or the National History Museum, courtesy of the international office. I opted for the Deutsche Historische Museum, i.e. the German History one. It was actually very cool. I started from the beginning settlements of this region of Europe and stretched through WWII. It was actually really hard to make it all the way through in the 2 hours we were allotted. In fact, we ended up waiting around on a couple of people for another hour, ensuring that none of us really got a lunch break. (Several people in our group of 68 thought they were the only ones there in Berlin, and didn't realize that 67 other people were waiting on their butts. Needless to say, it was frustrating, but by Friday I decided not to care anymore what other people did and just enjoy myself.)
Thursday evening we went to the Normannenstrasse Museum which is the old headquarters of the Stadtsicherheit or State Security, better known as the Stasi, seers of everything in Eastern Germany after WWII. There's now a museum funded by a private group of investors who have taken control of sorting through the hundreds of tons of paperwork that the Stasi collected during their reign of peeping. Our tour guide said that something like 50% of all the intelligence collected has still yet to be gone through, simply because of the size of it all. Apparently one guy who was a state supporter but later spoke out against the regime, had one of the largest files. If all his paperwork, videos, etc. had been lined up back to back, it would have stretched 18 kilometers!!! That's so ridiculous!

Friday we went to another museum that is at the House of the Wannsee Conference. This is the place where the Nazis held a secret meeting to discuss the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question." Many people think this is where they actually made the decision to kill off the Jews, but Hitler had already made that decision and it was being carried out in various formats all over the country. Unfortunately none of them were entirely successful. They originally wanted to ship all the Jews off to Madagascar thinking they would eventually just all die out. But they didn't have the Naval power to do so. Then they wanted to ship them all to Siberia, where again, they would all die, but Russia probably wouldn't have been a big fan of that one. And mass executions like the Massacre of 300,000 men, women, and children, was bad for troop morale. So they discussed other options here, and Hitler's right hand man filled in all the other big hancho's right hand men.

After that we had free time, so Sophie, Stacy, and I and a couple of other girls wandered around downtown. We went to this famous store for the Ampelmaennchen in Berlin. That's the little light up guys in the cross walk signals on the streets. In old Eastern Berlin the men in the crosswalk signal look entirely different than the normal, everyday kind of looking men in the Western side of Berlin. Hence, it's easy to tell where in the city you are based on what the crosswalk signal looks like.

Saturday we drove out to Potsdam which is a city outside of Berlin. This is where Frederick the Great built his summer residence palace. He preferred living here as opposed to anywhere else, apparently, and was eventually buried here as well. It was a gorgeous place and I took a thousand pictures. I couldn't take pics from the inside because they were forbidden, but they have all the original furniture, paintings, etc. inside the house. It was really pretty. Thankfully we also had some sun that afternoon as we took a guided tour through the gardens of the property.

All in all it was a really fun trip. I think one of the coolest things about it was seeing how much history is incorporated into every day life in the city. There's a brick line that runs on the ground, through sidewalks, streets, etc. wherever the Wall used to stand. I think it's cool to see where the city used to be divided. And I think today people find it sooooo easy to cross over where the wall once stood, that they don't realize not even 20 yrs ago thousands of people gave their lives trying to do the exact same thing. In some places, people refuse to build on the ground where the wall used to be. In parts of it there were wide open spaces of lawn between each side of the wall that was patrolled by soldiers and dogs, and these places are mostly still empty because no one wants to build there.

Okay well check out the pictures. I'll try to update more frequently. I'm headed to Paris this weekend with Sophie and Stacy so I'll be sure to post again along with even more pictures after that event! Love you all.