Germany, day 15: Berlin, Day 1

After a laundry panic, I managed to pack up all my clothes and everything for our trip to Berlin. Unbeknownst to me, most of the other students had gone to the train station the day before to get their rail passes validated. I had not, so I had to wait in line to get mine stamped, which took much more time than I had expected. Still, we made the train without too much haste.

The way to Berlin was mostly through natural landscapes, whizzing by at around 200 km/h. One major difference that I noticed between Germany and the United States is that Germans are fond of wind power. Indeed, close to Berlin, there is a large number of turbines, all spinning joyously in-sync. It looks a lot better than a fiel of oil derricks, in my opinion.

Once we got to Berlin, we took the local train, a red-and-gold beast whose colors seem to have lost their beauty and majesty, to the zoological gardens, which is on stop past the famed Tierhof. Once we left the station, our professor-guided tour began. The first professor, who taught us statics, had never been to Berlin before, so the dynamics professor, an avid pipe-smoker, led us on a tour to our hotel.

We passed by the memorial church, which had been partially destroyed in World War II. From what the outspoken Berliner there interjected, the church is only a tourist attraction, and it is "not ****ing Berlin." Needless to say, we passed a great many cameras around the church.

After getting to our hotel, we dropped our bags into what rooms were ready and headed off to our first big stop of the day: the Victory Column.

Coincidently, the day before we arrived was Obama's tour of Berlin. I hear that some Germans refer to Obama as the "Black Kennedy", which is indeed a very high honor.

Obama had given a speech at the Column the previous day, which may have contributed to the number of police vehicles on the scene.




We next visited the Brandenburg Gate, which can now be seen from both sides. I figure that, rather than publish all those pictures, I'd give an interesting one: the back of German-print sub-Euro coins have the Gate on the reverse, which can barely be made out in the picture. The area on the East-Berlin side of the gate is very modern, as it was previously desolate from the War and from Soviet clearing.

The Reichstag, now restored, is the seat of the German parliament. It's a very pretty old building with a great number of tourists on the lawn before it.

The glass dome represents transparency, an quality of a government who tries to be open and keep no secrets.







In this picture are three monuments. The Reichstag in the left background, the Brandenburg gate on the right, and the Jewish Holocaust memorial. That's what the stones are. Hundreds and thousands of stones. People play on them, walk on them, and save for the "information center" and a plaque, you'd have no idea that it had any meaning. Germans are not at all proud of the Holocaust or its artifacts, and the vagueness of the memorial was hotly contested in the parliament. The information center is really a museum that adds a personal aspect to the Holocaust, and has its own security check.


For dinner, we went as a group to a restaurant known as the Bavarium. I had cheesy spaetzle dish and a Loewenbraeu Original. I tasted the L. Dark, which I kind of preferred. The dish was good, and was one of the few entries on the vegetarian section. But at least they had such a section!

Eating vegetarian in Germany is hard; the street vendors are often selling bratwurst or some type of meat, and the bakeries tend to be carb-intensive with little protein. There are, of course. exceptions, and I can eat vegetarian well enough when I'm responsible for my own food.