Ich bin ein Berliner!

Last weekend my program went to Berlin. About fifty of us loaded onto a bus and drove for six hours. When we arrived at our hostel, I learned that it was called "The Heart of Gold Hostel" and was loosely based off of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (one of my favorite books), so I was pretty excited. It only got better, because the four person room that Lindsey, Jordan, Channing, and I were supposed to be in had flooded, so got a twelve person room all to ourselves.

We were up on the top floor, so this is a view out the window down into the courtyard.

Wednesday night we got some dinner and then decided to go to a club on a map the hostel gave us called "Icon." However, after walking through Berlin for 45 minutes, we discovered that it had closed down over a year ago. We gave up and took a taxi back, and ended up having a lot of fun just hanging out in the hostel bar.

Thursday we all went on a bus tour around Berlin to see a bunch of sights. We were going pretty quickly and only got off the bus at the wall, so I only managed to get a bunch of picture of buildings through the windows, and I don't remember why most of them are important :/

This is the main train station in Berlin

This is a Museum (I think) and the slang name of it is the pregnant oyster.

I'm pretty sure this is where the German President lives (not the Chancellor, they have both).

The gold things are original gold-plated cannons, but I'm not sure from which war.

This is the German Olympic stadium.

This was a building built during the Nazi time. It's pretty easy to tell haha.

Turkish Embassy.

This is a Jewish museum. The architect created the lines by plotting where Jewish people had lived in Berlin, and then connected them.


























Finally we got off the bus and were at the longest remaining portion of the Berlin wall. Notice how tall it is. You really can't see over it unless you're pretty far away.

Here I am next to the famous painting of Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev kissing.

The west side and east side

Here's a gate that was added later (after it fell)

Back on the bus!

That afternoon we went on a tour of a Stasi prison. The Stasi were the secret police of East Germany, and committed horrible acts including surveillance, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of innocent people under the soviet communist government. It was pretty intense and I learned a lot, so I'm going to do an entire post about it next week.

That night we went to a really cool bar. It was called Bierbürse, which translates to beer stock exchange. The prices of beer fluctuated all night based on their demand (how many people were buying them). As my friend Vicky said, it turned something incredibly confusing and destructive into something relatively simple and really fun.

Friday we went on a walking tour to some other sights. Unfortunately, my camera was close to battery death and I had forgotten to bring my charger with me, so I only have a few pictures :/

This is Checkpoint Charlie, so named because it was the third check point (Alpha, Bravo, then Charlie) that Americans used to move between East and West Berlin.

 These were some old East German buildings I liked.

 This picture demonstrates something really cool about Berlin. There are so many different historical sites all over the place, piled on top of each other and mixed in with modern things. Some things date back to when German was still Prussia, but right next to it there are things from WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and brand new buildings. This is a picture of a Jewish prison that was used in the holocaust, but then there is another large section of the Berlin wall right above it. Craziness.

 This building was just really cool. It had all these mini sculptures on the sides.

This is the last picture I managed to get before my camera died. This is the holocaust memorial. I really like it a lot. I think the creator did a really fantastic job of capturing what the memory of the holocaust means to Germans today. It's really just another part of the city, in the same way that in some ways it's just another part of history. Children are even allowed to play on it because it's supposed to be a part of everyday life. Not forgotten, but not to overly dwell on. But then, if you feel like walking through the memorial, (metaphorically, ruminating on the holocaust), you can do so at your leisure. Additionally, you can't tell from the outside, but the inner columns are over twelve feet tall because the ground slopes down in waves in the same way that the height of them does along the top. So when you get into the center, you get very deep and can get very uncomfortable or claustrophobic. I think this does such a great job of showing what the holocaust is to German people.