Well...so much for my ambition to post frequently! I've been in Germany almost an entire week now, and this is my first attempt to sit down and write! It's amazing that I've only been here a week- I feel like I've always lived here!
So here's how the first week went down: I left Houston at noon last Tuesday, flew to Newark, then arrived in Berlin at 8am Wednesday morning. On the Newark-Berlin flight I was surrounded by German speakers, and through my clever use of eavesdropping, I discovered that despite my 4+ years of German instruction, I couldn't understand a word! Silly German teachers for inflating my opinion of my language skills by giving me good grades all these years...Anyway, once all of the other students in my program arrived in Berlin (there are 10 all together), we checked in to Amstel House (my first Hostel!). During our four day stay in Berlin, we went to zillions of churches, museums (!), monuments, old buildings, etc. It's amazing being in a city with so much history! On Thursday we took a bike tour of downtown Berlin and all of the famous sites, which was AMAZING!Thursday night we went to the Pergamon museusm, which is really famous for REALLY good reasons! The museum has fantastic exhibits on Islamic art, painted polychromatic Greco-Roman sculptures (which made ME really happy because far too people know that all those pure white marble statues were brilliantly colored once upon a time!), and Assyrian artifacts. They also have the city gates of Babylon. Let me say that again.... the ACTUAL CITY GATES of the BIBLICAL CITY BABYLON! It was ridiculously amazing! On Friday, we saw a wonderful monument to all of the victims of WWII. It was a sculpture done by a woman from the former Soviet Bloc, and depicted a mother holding her dying child. The sculpture was inside a building with a hole cut directly above it, so rain could get through and cover the statue. It's probably one of the most beautiful and moving pieces of art I've ever seen. Later on Friday, we went to the Deutsches Historisches Muesum, which was probably the highlight of the Berlin trip for me, because now I have a new favorite museum!! It pretty much covers the entire history of Germany...period. Besides being absolutely GINORMOUS, and having an AMAZING set of collections, the chronology was so clear and the exhibits so well themed and arranged that it was an absolute delight to see! There was also a new temporary exhibit on medieval Germany, and they had all sorts suits of armor, which they arranged to look like they were fighting! Brilliant move, museum people! Later on Friday we went to the Neues Museum, which has the bust of Nefertiti and all sorts of fun Egyptian stuff. The exhibits weren't as impressive, but the museum building itself is so old and has so much history that I spent all of the time looking at the architecture and bullet holes! Saturday we went to Sachsenhausen, which was one of the Nazi concentration camp (though not a death camp like Auschwitz). The exhibition and museum part of the camp was pretty impressive, but the place itself made the biggest impact on me. People placed yellow gerber daisies in random places around the camp in memory of the people who died there, and stacked small rocks on graves as a more permanent act of remembrance. In the evenings we were free to do whatever we wanted, so we went out and explored Berlin most evenings. I got pretty good at navigating the train system! All in all, it was an amazingly wonderful trip and I hope I can go back to Berlin soon!
I think I've rambled enough about Berlin for one post...next post, Quedlinburg!
