This was a week of extremes. We went from nonstop work in
the first part of the week, to a fun and relaxing vacation in the capital. Monday
through Wednesday were dedicated to finalizing our Enmodes project for the
Thursday presentation. My host family was out of town, so I spent almost all my
time at school. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we were at school from 10 am to 12
and 2 am working. Although the presentation we ended up with after all this
work was good, I feel like there was a better way to go about preparing for it
besides cramming the work into the span of two nonstop days. Anyways, on
Thursday we dressed up, and went on our way to Aachen to give our presentation.
I felt that my group and I did a good job with our talk, although I feel a bit ‘shell-shocked’
from the whole ordeal. To celebrate our success, we had a glass of champagne,
and an afternoon relaxing in Bonn.
The next day Josh, Sid, and I got on our plane to Berlin. To
get there, I had to walk to the night bus, for which the stop was down a small
path through the woods, which was a little odd. But overall it was a smooth
trip. The weather for the entire trip was absolutely beautiful, I was actually
warm at points in the city, which was a very welcome change. Our first day was
spent seeing some of the outdoor sites of the city, like the Reichstag, the
Brandenburg Gate, and Checkpoint Charlie, which was kind of a tourist trap in
my opinion. In addition, we saw the very impressive Memorial for the Murdered
Jews. As you walk up to it, you see many short ‘tombs’, but as you walk between
the stones, they start to grow, and soon they are more than three times as tall
as you. It really makes you feel the magnitude of the awfulness of the
Holocaust. To add onto that, we visited the Topography of Terror, a free
outdoor museum all about the Nazi’s rise to power and what life was like in
that time. It was crazy to see exactly what the time was like, and how the
people allowed and even supported their reign. After a long day, we checked
into our hotel, and discovered that Lindsay had hooked us up with free food in
the lounge with her reservation, which was really amazing. We had dinner there
and chilled at the pool that evening.
We spent most of the next day in museums on the famous
Museuminsel in the heart of Berlin. We visited the Bode museum, which had many
sculptures, the Altes Nationalgalerie, which had a lot of cool paintings, and,
best of all, the Pergamon museum. The Pergamon has a ton of incredibly large
displays. They literally took an entire Babylonian gate apart brick by brick
and moved it to Berlin. It was amazing, and it also had a lot of cool Islamic
history. We also got to go to the Berliner Dom, which was kind of underwhelming
in my opinion. For the evening, we walked along the East Side Gallery and saw all
of the cool graffiti art pieces. We got a beer and chilled along the Spree and
listened to some live music, and then got bibimbab for dinner.
Our next day was spent exploring some of the other areas of
town we’d missed. We started by visiting a couple okay interactive museums
about espionage and the DDR(East Germany). I felt that the DDR museum sanitized
the history of the country too much and left gateways to ‘Ostalgia’ as they
call it in Berlin, which is apparently pretty common in the far Eastern parts
of Germany. We visited the Easter market in Alexanderplatz, admired the TV
tower, and made our way to Kreuzberg for some delicious Döner. We found an out
of the way kebab shop, and got what was by far the best Döner I’ve had in
Europe. After we visited a flea market in Prenzlauer Berg, which felt like a completely
different country than Kreuzberg. I felt like I’d taken a train from Eastern
Germany to Austin, as the area was very Americanized and hipster. I loved it.
After the flea market, I went to a nearby concert by one of my favorite
American artists, Panda Bear. I had a lot of fun there.
Our last day in Berlin, Easter Monday, was a much more chill
day. We went to the Natural History Museum, saw a lot of preserved fish, and
took a nap in a park. We then caught our flight back to Bonn, which went very
smoothly aside from the Easter weekend crowds.
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