Day 79 - Berlin

I woke up super early today so I could get ready and showered, but then I thought "nah, I'm not doing that much today, and I have almost all my stuff packed" and slept a little bit more. When I did eventually get up for real, I got everything ready, ate, and left for the meeting place. I got to the tram OK, and got off at the right stop. When I got to our meeting spot, I saw some people getting onto the bus and gave the driver my luggage so I could join my classmates. Luckily, there weren't that many people on the bus yet, so I was able to claim an entire row so I could sleep if I so chose. what was even better was that the bus was big enough that everyone could have their own row if they so chose. We waited for a few more minutes to get the stragglers, but even when we had waited for quite a while, we were still missing one person. We eventually had to stop by her house to pick her up, but by the time that 6:30 came around, we were on our way to Berlin. The ride was 6 hours long, so most of us tried to catch up on sleep by assuming various positions on the bus, and some (including me) tried out all of them: head towards the row, head towards the widow, curled on the seats, sitting like normal, etc. Any position that you could think of for sleeping was tried out. We eventually stopped at around 10:30 for the driver to take a break and for us to get food. It also did the favor of waking everyone up so we didn't sleep too long.

We ate a snack and some got breakfast before getting back on the bus for the rest of our ride to Berlin. I started to read the book Emma and talked with some people about the classes that we'll be taking next semester in the fall. However, I eventually fell asleep again and only woke up when Kristin came by to give me the money for food for the week. At that point, I stayed awake until we actually arrived in Berlin. When we stopped, we got all of our stuff out and into the hotel that we were staying at for the week before being told that we would be meeting in an hour and 15 minutes for our next activity. My two roommates and I went up to get settled into our room before going to the nearby grocery store for a quick lunch. We met up with everyone to go to a bike store where we would be taken on a bike tour of the city. Unfortunately, Kelsey wasn't able to join us becasue her foot was still hurting her and she didn't want to aggrivate it by riding on a bike for 3 or more hours.

"Alex" was the tallest thing in Europe at one point. Also called "God's revenge" because it was built by Soviet Germany (contracted out to Swedish architects), but when the sun sets, it creates a cross...something communists really didn't like

The ride was awesome! Our tour guide was really interesting to listen to and brought us to all the touristy places to tell us the historical facts of different places. We visited the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie (which is not manned by real US soldiers,) the Jewish Memorial, Hitler's bunker, and even Parliament. Yeah, you'll be sing pictures of all of those soon. After that, we said goodbye to our tour guide for now since we'll be seeing him on Wednesday and went to where we would be eating dinner for the evening. The night was spent in good company and we had a lot of fun talking to our professors and classmates. We even got to get to know Lucy a little bit better and had an all around good time.

 Where the old palace used to stand, replaced by the Communist parliament, now being rebuild as the old palace.

 A memorial to the famous Nazi book burning (as shown in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)

A school built by Frederich the Great, a very open-minded Prussian Emporer who also built theaters and churches

 A church Frederich built

 A theater Frederich built

 Parts of the Berlin Wall

 The sign by Checkpoint Charlie

 Checkpoint Charlie (not actually correct in it's placement)

 Where the wall was originally placed

The Berlin Wall (a part still intact)

A communist building close to the wall. One family made it over the wall by zip-lining from this building to the other side. Since then, bars were put on all the windows to prevent a repeat.

 Where Hitler's bunker used to be

 The Jewish Memorial

 The German Parliament. It's glass to symbolize that all the people could see what was going on in Parliament (and you can in the inner mirrors) so something like WWII would never happen again.

Our tour guide

Poor Kristin guarded our bikes while we saw the Parliament building

Group hug after the tour was over

After dinner, we went back to the hotel, passing by a group of wildly yelling Germans (weird) and getting ready for sleep. Tomorrow promises to be a busy day as we're visiting a History of Medicine Museum and a skills testing facility before another group dinner. I'm pretty excited.

By for now!
Erin Z