Guten Abend!

I am back in Paris safe and sound, so no worries about that. But I had another busy weekend!

Thursday I had class all day, and then I hurried home to pack my suitcase and took an 8:30 pm train to Berlin that arrived around 8:45 the next morning. I took a bus to the hostel where I stored my bag and got a bonus free breakfast, because it was too early to actually go into my room.

At 10 am I left to go on Berlin's free walking tour. In the hour I had spent in the hostel, it had started to rain rather substantially and, after brief consideration, I had decided not to bring my umbrella to Berlin. So as I walked towards the tour's meeting spot I stopped and bought a five euro umbrella so that I would stay nice and dry.

And two minutes later it all turned to snow.

I debated giving up on a 3 hour walking tour in the snow, but since I didn't have other plans and I needed to see Berlin one way or another, I decided to go anyways. There ended up being tons of other people willing to take the tour, so we split into groups of 25 and headed out for the tour.

It was very, very cold, but also very informative. We started at the Brandenburg Gate on Pariser Platz and then walked by the Reichstag (Parliament) building, the area above Hitler's bunker, the Holocaust Memorial, the Nazi book burning memorial at Bebelplatz, Checkpoint Charlie, Museum Island area, portions of the Berlin wall, East Germany's TV tower, and Gendarmenmarkt with pretty churches. And it was free (plus tip)!

I was surprised how ever-present the wars (WWII and Cold War) were in Berlin. On almost every street corner you were within view of a memorial or a historicized site, or a demolished building, or the brick line on the ground marking the location of the Berlin Wall. As a result, the city seemed very heavy and serious and really hammered in how recent all of this "history" is. It is the first time that the history in Europe has really been within my lifetime (the Berlin Wall fell in 1989) and while it is obviously important to remember everything that has happened, it also seems difficult to move on when there are reminders of the terrible past on every block. That being said, Berlin is theoretically one of the most dynamic cities in Europe with alternative views and all sorts of continuous change. But I still wouldn't want to live there.

Then I went back to the hostel to defrost, and ended up not going back out. I ate dinner at the bar on the ground floor of the hostel and ate a delicious hamburger, which I had been craving with two of my hostel roommates. So my evening was very relaxing (and delicious) and I got a lot of Proust reading done, which I needed.

It snowed again Friday night and was cold again on Saturday, so I headed for Museum Island. But on the way over I stopped at the Berliner Dom - a Protestant cathedral with a domed roof that you could climb for views of Berlin and a crypt underneath containing tombs from the Hohenzollern Dynasty. The inside of the church was pretty, and it was nice being able to look out over the city.

Then I went to the Pergamon Museum named for the enormous Pergamon Altar with carvings of Greek gods in a huge frieze. The audio guide was free, so I took the half hour highlights tour that gave me lots of interesting information without telling me too much. After the Pergamon Altar, I saw the Ishtar Gate from Babylon which was very cool and also enormous.

Next I went to the Agyptisches Egyptian Museum to see the bust of Queen Nefertiti and the Altes Museum which had a big rotunda lined with Greek statues (it cost 6 euro to go to the Pergamon Museum or 8 euro for all the museums in the area, so I was okay with just seeing the highlights everywhere).

Next I walked from Museum Island towards the Holocaust Memorial, because I wanted to spend more time there alone, and go into the free museum part underground. On the way I stopped at a Christmas market that only had a few booths that had opened early, and I had a bratwurst! It was basically like a hot dog on a hard roll, and it was pretty good. And it was also hot, and I was freezing.

The Holocaust Memorial (technically the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) has 2,711 cement blocks of the same 2D dimensions, but of different heights placed in a grid pattern that the architect left up for interpretations. You can walk through the memorial and reflect and it may represent tombstones, soldiers lined up for battle, the confusion of war…or it might not. It means whatever it means to you. But it was actually pretty cool.

In the underground portion, there is a museum with a timeline and pictures describing the Holocaust as well as personal stories and quotations. There are 6 individual's stories highlighted in the first hallway and then the explanation that behind each story, there are a million more stories. There were 6 million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust, so they literally mean one million stories behind each of the 6 they told. Which is inconceivable.

Six million.

Then I wandered over to Potzdamer Platz where another Christmas market was underway. I drank some hot chocolate and ate three mini apple strudel rings and three puffy donut hole things, and that was tasty and German of me.

Next I walked back to Museum Island and paid separately to go to the Old National Gallery, which was supposed to be an Impressionist Museum. There were a few paintings that I really liked, including some by Schinkel who was an important architect in Berlin, but the museum wasn't overly incredible.

By then it was 5:15 and it was dark and I called Kevin (and woke him up, oops) while I walked to the Reichstag building. I waited in line in the cold for about 40 minutes and then passed security and took the elevator up to the Reichstag dome. The dome was all open air, which meant that I was still very cold (it had started to snow softly) but it was nice to look out over Berlin all lit up. But perhaps the cooler part was when you looked down into the center of the Reichstag, because the Parliament room was right underneath the dome and had a glass roof so you could see in. And even better, there was a column of angled mirrors over the glass dome so that members of Parliament could always look up and see the people watching them as a reminder of whom they are working for and what they should be trying to do. And I thought that was pretty neat.

I was going to stop somewhere for dinner, but I walked for a little while without finding anywhere good, so I ended up going back to the hostel and eating with another one of my roommates there. I had another hamburger and Berliner Weisse that had been recommended by my tour guide. Berliner Weisse is green beer. And it is also disgusting. It is the color of the classic science beaker green potion, and it tastes like you would expect science potion to taste like. So I hardly drank any of it, because it was gross.

On Sunday I went to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. I joined a tour offered by the same company that had run the free Berlin walking tour (but this one cost 12 euros) and we took the light rail system for 50 minutes outside of Berlin. Sachsenhausen was a work camp during the Holocaust where over 50,000 prisoners died before being liberated by the Soviets following the Death March (a forced march of the prisoners in an attempt to escape the Soviets, during which 250 prisoners died every day). Several hundred prisoners who had been too sick to march and were left to die were nursed back to health by the Soviets over the next few months and the last one was able to leave on August 8, 1945. On August 10, 1945, the Soviets reopened the camp with truckloads of political prisoners they had captured - anyone from Nazi conspirators to people who had made unwanted comments in the street. The camp stayed open for another 5 years, during which 1/3 of the prisoners were under the age of 18 (the youngest was 4) and a mass grave of 12,000 bodies was later discovered.

In the 50s the camp was used as a military training facility where they tested explosives. As a result, most of the buildings were destroyed and left on the ground as rubble. In 1961, the site was memorialized (but only to honor the Communists who had been held there) and the buildings were puzzled back together using the original materials.

We walked through entrance Tower A, toured two barracks, the roll call area, the special prison, the kitchen, Station Z (gas chambers and execution area), and the pathology lab (which I and several others left a few minutes early on account of feeling sick from the stories she was telling inside). Our tour guide had lots of facts and also lots of terrible stories and the tour was really well done. There were some strange aspects of the memorializing of the site, such as a large concrete wall built through the roll call area, the planting of trees making it look more cheerful, and strange monuments to communism. It was also strange to see that the houses built by prisoners' slave labor for the guards to live in were still inhabited by German citizens and the barracks used for the training of the Gestapo are now used for a police academy.

The stories were powerful, but it was still hard to connect the fact that they had all taken place right there where we were walking, especially when only the foundation of the building remained in many places. But as someone else pointed out, it was scary to think that someone had been murdered on every piece of ground we walked on. And that was rather chilling.

We caught an express train back to Berlin that only took 20 minutes, and then I went to the Ku'damn shopping street. It was a Sunday evening so most of the stores were closed, but I didn't want to buy anything anyway, and it was still all lit up. So I walked a ways down that street to gather the ambience - which was nice since it didn't have blatant historical and war-torn connections and connotations - and then bought a kebab for dinner.

But it was like no kebab I've ever had before! It was more like a pita made out of panini bread with chicken and vegetables and special sauce inside. And it was delicious and very filling and only cost like 3 euros, so that was excellent. And then I went back to the hostel.

Monday morning I checked out of the hostel and stored my bag and then went to the East Side Gallery - the longest standing portion of the Berlin Wall covered with fancy graffiti. There were some cool designs on the wall, but a lot of it was peeling away, so it wasn't quite as astounding as I was hoping. But it was nice to see the long stretch of Berlin wall.

Oh! And some guy asked me in German for directions to the metro station that I had just come from, and I pointed the way there for him. At least, I hope that's what he wanted directions to…

Speaking of which, I get approached all the time by people looking for directions. Usually in a language I don't speak, such as Dutch or German. And they obviously don't know what they're getting themselves into when the ask me for directions…

Anyways, after the East Side Gallery I went to the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. The museum was interesting because it had tons of stories about how people escaped East Berlin and crossed the wall, including the actual cars, propellers, and hot air balloons they had used, but since I had already heard several of the stories on my walking tour, it might have been a bit pricey (10 euro for students).

Monday was warmer than the other days had been, which meant that I could wander a bit more without freezing. And I enjoy wandering because you see more of the city and allows you to leave the touristed areas for other side streets, which helped me see more of Berlin outside of its historical context and in its present living conditions.

So I wandered a bit and ate another delicious "kebab" before going to the Jewish History Museum, which was actually quite entertaining. It told the history of Jewish people from the Middle Ages until modern day, with an emphasis on the themes of persecution and discrimination. There was a lot of text to read, but the museum also had lots of interactive exhibits, which helped hold my interest. Sometimes that just meant you had to open a drawer or pull a lever to get the information, sometimes you put together a puzzle to match Jewish letters, or sometimes you used interactive computer screens to learn about the daily lives of Jewish people during WWII. The architecture of the building was also really cool and had been designed specifically for the Jewish Museum. There were several empty spaces leading up through the museum representing the gaps in society where the Jews belonged as well as a Remembrance Garden and Memory Void chamber, which were thought-provoking additions.

I was there for about 2 hours and then I was finished with museums! I walked back to Potsdamer Platz where more Christmas markets had opened, and I spent a few hours there wandering about and looking at the different booths. I bought dinner (beef cubes, red peppers, and onions stir fryed together and German potatoes…I don't know what the meat dish was called because it was very long and in German) and paid to go tubing down a huge snow hill they had set up (like when we set up the moon walk bouncy things at carnivals), which was fun. And I almost bought a new coat and a hat, but I didn't.

Overall I haven't bought much in Europe so far. I've been spending money on food and museums and experiences, and not much on souvenirs. I bought a belt in Barcelona, an umbrella in Berlin, chocolate galore in Bruges, and a scarf in Paris…and that's about it. Oh, and books galore. I looked in Berlin and Bruges for Christmas ornaments, but didn't find any that said the city name and were also attractive, so I didn't get them. But I was talking to someone else from my program today and she agreed that there isn't much in Europe that you can't get in the US, and it costs more here. So while it sounds like a brilliant idea to buy everyone Christmas presents in France and lots of souvenirs, it isn't really that practical.

Money-wise, Berlin was a pretty cheap city. I spent about 25 euros a day, not including the hostel. And since Rachel Ray gets to have a whole TV show on account of she can limit her food budget to $40 a day, I think that's pretty dang good.

After the Christmas market I went back to the hostel to get my backpack and went to the train station. I ended up getting there quite early, on account of I apparently can't tell time. So I did my homework and was productive (and also cold, because it was open air) and then I took the train back to Paris, which arrived at 10:15 am instead of 9:15 am, so I had to head right to class.

I liked Berlin overall and the people were very friendly with my attempts at German. I feel like I learned and experienced a lot of history, but wouldn't want to live there for that very same reason. It's not so much that the city is struggling to overcome its history, as that the history is inescapable and it would be difficult to carry on your daily life while constantly reflecting on the fall of the Berlin wall and the victims of the Holocaust. But my weekend was delightful, and it was balanced by the Christmas markets and walk down Ku'damn and other non-historical aspects that do exist in Berlin.

(Pictures will come soon, I haven't uploaded them yet and I don't have the cable with me...)

The end.