Last week we got a break from school to spend five days in Berlin (Wednesday to Sunday). After spending longer on the bus than on the plane coming here (7 hours!), we finally arrived in berlin. My first impressions were of its overwhelming stature and modern metropolitan feel. I immediately decided that I feel the same way about Berlin as I do about New York: it's a great placeto visit and full of culture and life, but it's too large and modern and I could never live there.
Wednesday night we were all too exhausted to do much, so after a very cold trip to the Reichstag to see the city laid out before us at night, we basically just went to bed. Thursday, however, we had plenty to do. Our day began with a three hours bus tour, that basically consisted of us driving around on a foggy bus trying desperately to stay awake and to see through the clouded windows as the bus driver told us historical information, that in almost any other setting I would have absorbed with a lot more enthusiasm. This was punctuated by occasional stops to get out and see things (The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Checkpoint Charlie, The Reichstag), where we would stand in the freezing cold and the snow to listen to the guide tell us things that we could have heard while still on teh warm bus. The stop at the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was definitely worth it though. It was an extremely powerful monument. It's comprised of hundreds of dark grey stone slabs that get increasingly taller as you walk among them, and htey seem to go on forever until you feel overwhelmed and disoriented. It's very powerful, but some people seemed to find it appropriate to run among the stones yelling and having a snowball fight. Oh how I hate some people. It was very cold there too though, and there were occasional moments when I was actually afriad for my toes (frostbite seemed likely and I just kept repeating "meine Zehe sind taub!"), so getting back to the hsotel was a welcome relief. That afternoon we had free time, and we spent it going to KaDeWe, where we promptly realized everything was WAY to expensive and turned arond, the Erotic Museum, which turned out to be less historical than we expected and to cointain a lot more 18th and 19th century Japanese porn, and the deutsches historisches Museum, which was amazing. It started with the Romans and went all the way up through the reunification in 1990. The detail was incredible, and they had some really interesting things. The historical overviews were also extremely detailed, and helpful for brushing up on everything from AP Euro. Heather knowing an excessive amount about German history also helped, and we had some wonderful history nerd moments. It's nice having someone to tell me all the details I never learned, and to help me refresh the slowly fading facts.
Friday we had almost the entire day scheduled. We began with a bus tour to Potsdam (about forty-five minutes outside the main city), where we got a tour of an old Stasi prison and interrogation center. We could look into the cells and see exactly where these people were kept, and although the guide was very good I wish I had more time to read the information signs and just absorb everything. The fact that a lot of people on our tour were so hung over that they could barely stand also didn't help my attempts to feel the touch of history (yes, this is how I think of it, I am a history nerd). After lunch in an adorable café and some pastries at a bakery across the street, we got back on teh bus and drove to Schloss Sanssouci, the summer home of Friedrich Wilhelm the Great. It was beautiful and full of gold and marble, but I tend not to love palaces - it's too much gold and baroquiness for me. There was one rom we went to where Voltaire used to stay, and Heather turned to me and said something like "think of all the thoughts that were thought in this room." That part was pretty cool. We also watched one of the still-snowball-fighting Colorado kids put a snowball into his pocket and then walk into the palace. Say what? Luckily our guide was wonderful and adorable and took care of the Schneeball by placing it on Friedrich's grave as a token of remembrance.
After dinner that night the program sponsored a trip to the theatre, where we saw a play called "Das Versprechen," or "The Promise." It was a crime story written in the 1950s to address the issues of guilt and responsibility felt after WWII, but the director of this particular version had used a decidedly post-modern interpretation that left me quite confused. Not because of th German, but because of things such as someone whipping out a gun and shooting someone as "a theatrical display of anger," not to kill them. This type of thing led to confusion that I would have felt in English as much as German, but all in all I definitely enjoyed myself. They also gave us mini gummibears at the coat chck, and candy makes everything better.
That night we went out and found an adorable bar that also happened to be "The Smallest Brewery in Berlin." After wandering around for a while more, and finding ourselves in a bar frequented by a lot of 16-year-old German high school students clearly on some sort of fieldtrip, we ended the night wiht a late-night Donor (not for me, obviously). While getting said donor we were approached by some German teenagers who wanted us to kiss them for a documentary on love in Berlin. We gave them pecks on the cheek, worried briefly about Herpes, and then went home to finally sleep.
We had to wake up the next morning for a three hour tour of Kreuzburg, the hip and trendy section of Berlin. Luckily our guide realized it was extremely cold, and after giving us a lot of extremely interesting informatin let our tour end an hour or so early. Kreuzburg is located in what was East Berlin, and is now where most of the immigrant population of Berlin is centered and the area for night life and art. This means a large number of Imbisses serving Eastern and Middle Eastern food, as well as a lot of clubs, street art, and graffiti. It was a neat place to see and is probably the most likely place in Berlin for the tag-alongs that we somehow acquired on our tour. These two guys who hadn't slept, were probably still pretty high, and were drinking beer at nine a.m. decided to come along on our tour. They were harmless and pretty nice, but it was just a hysterical situation to begin with. Of course, Erwin befriended them.
We finished our tour with a stop at a waffle and crepe place, before a free afternoon in which Kaci, Leigh, Heather, and I headed over to the Jüdisches Museum. The museum was fascinating, so full of detailsand information that it was almost overwhelming. The best part was definitely the part you had to go through to get to the main exhibits. The architect (whose name I forget) is somewhat of a genious. This part is comprised of three halls, called the Axis of Exile, the Axis of Continuity, and the Axis of the Holocaust, with the latter splitting through the other two, which run parallel to each other. Along these hallways are windows where you can see artifacts left behind by people sent to die in the concentration camps and read a brief history of their life. It was extremely moving and sad to see an entire life summed up in one photograph or artifact and two to five paragraphs of text. At the end of the Axis of the Holocaust is the Holocaust Tower. Entering this room might have been the most moving thing to happen to me that weekend, beyond the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe or the life-sized sculpture of two people at the liberation of Dachau (one alive cradling another dead, but both looking like corpses) at the liberation of Dachau. Holocaust Tower at the Jüdisches Museum is an empty room made of cold dark concrete, and in a triangular shape. The point of the triangle is the corner of the room that you see when you enter, and it is probably 100 feet high with nothing except a slit about 80 feet up from the ground. This split is open tot he outside and provides the only contact with any world besides the cold concrete of the walls and the cavernous dark. The slit is so high, however, that all you can see is a dim shaft of light and all you can hear are the vague sounds of cars passing on the road outside. It was cold, because of this opening letting in the February air from outside, and extremely powerful. It was one of the most isolating feelings, like being stripped down to your very bones, and the utter emptiness combined with the impossible promise of an invisible outside world captured the pain of the Holocaust in a way that can't be described. The entire museum was designed around the idea of voids, and this room was the most powerful demosntration of that concept I can imagine.
Saturday night Heather and I wanted to do something different, and had been talking to Kathryn about doing karaoke while in berling. So Heather managed to come across an ad for karaoke at Murray's Irish Pub. Somehow we managed to get everyone excited abouthtis idea, and a whole gan of about 20 people traipsed into the bar around eleven/eleven thirty. There was no one there for karaoke except the two people running it, but our group filled the room and made the party. Everyone had a great time and we were still singing until we had to leae at two due to the unhappiness of the neighbours. It was a great way to end our time in Berlin - especially as being back in Kreuzburg meant a chance to get a delicious falafel.
Sunday meant another unending bus ride and general exhaustion. I enjoyed Berlin, but was very much ready to get back to Regensburg. I like my little, oh so managable city. The opportunities for growth in Berlin are inspiring, but the dire necessity for it is depressing at the same time. I love my old, historical city here, that escaped the bombings of WWII, allowing the pain of Germany's past to be put on a backburner - still present yet less in-your-face, not as constant.
Tomorrow we get a view of the main BMW plant, which is in Regensburg (oh, hooray), and on Tuesday I'm getting a library card! I'm very excited - Heather, Kaci, and I checked out the library yesterday, and not only are there hundreds of wonderful looking German books (children's section, anyone?), there is even an "American Library" full of English books. And a Fremdsprache section with Spanish books. And history books all over. I am thrilled.
I am continually overwhelmed by my opportunities being here. I am so grateful that I am able to do this, and then get to explore beyond even just this amazing city. I don't for an instant regret missing a semester at Wesleyan to be here, and I often wish I could stay longer. I know I've only been here five weeks, I just feel like there's always so much left to do if I want to feel I've fully taken advantage of everything. I can't wait to live in Europe - there's no doubt in my mind now that I will do so at some point.
