Wochenende in Berlin! June 27-29

June 27th: Travel Day
On Friday morning we boarded the bus to Berlin. On the way, we stopped in a town called Dresden for lunch. Our resident director, Maike, is from Berlin, so she knew a lot about Dresden and showed us around. It was a beautiful town but very eerie, as almost everything in it had to be rebuilt because of the World War II bombing, and there are barely any locals around anymore.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Dresden was extremely precious to Germany, and to Hitler. It was the trendiest place around, and was where art and culture soared. This is a big reason it was targeted during WWII. Now, however, it is almost entirely occupied by tourists. It is known as "the city without a soul."

In the Main Square of Dresden

Creeeeppy....

We were told that one reason Prague is so special is because it was not heavily bombed during WWII, so all of the architecture is original. The buildings in Dresden were built to look exactly as they had before, but the burnt brick on many of the buildings told you that more than half of the building was newly built. 

One of the buildings that fell under this category was the biggest and most important Protestant church in Germany. At first it miraculously survived the bombings, but eventually it caught fire and had to be almost entirely rebuilt. It has a lot of spiritual meaning for the town. 

If you look on the left, you can see the burnt part of the building.

We continued on our way to Berlin and arrived in the late afternoon and explored a thrift store and biergarten in the area.

June 28I didn't realize until we arrived here how little I really knew about Berlin. It is a very trendy city, and also humongous-it is about 7 times the size of Paris. We started the day off with a bike tour, which was one of my favorite parts of the weekend. It was a great way to see the city, since it is so huge and difficult to see on foot.
 
We started off the tour at the Fernsehturm TV Tower, which is a giant needle-like tower that is the tallest in the EU. It can be seen from almost all over the city.

We stopped in front of Humboldt University, a very prestigious school where the Grimm Brothers and Albert Einstein taught. The square in front is where a student nazi party burned over 20,000 books before World War II, and deep in the ground there is a site containing old bookshelves from the event. 

We also stopped by Checkpoint Charlie, and our guide drew a map on the ground using chalk to show the evolution of Europe during the war, which oddly made me understand it a lot more than I ever have in school.

We then rode to a piece of the Berlin Wall that still had a guard tower in front of it, and learned of a few stories of what life was like when the wall was up. Our guide explained that nobody felt like they could trust anyone, because there hundreds of people were forced to work as secret spies and gather information about their neighbors for the government to compile into records. After the wall was torn down, the records actually became available for people to see. Some went to retrieve them but some do not wish to discover who betrayed them during that dark period of German history. 

The guide showed us the place where Hitler’s underground bunker was located. As he enthusiastically pointed out, “today, there is a Jewish bakery across the street, a gay sauna down the block, and a Chinese restaurant to our left. So in the end, we all won.”

We continued on our tour and saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It is a fairly controversial memorial because many believe that the memorial should be for everyone murdered in the Holocaust, not exclusively Jews. Nonetheless it was fascinating and emotional to walk through, and not your typical memorial at all. It is an entire square of these gray blocks that increase in size as you get further in. Although they are in relatively straight lines, you feel disoriented upon walking in. 

One of my favorite parts of the cycling tour was riding through Tiergarten Park, which is as large as Central Park and especially beautiful. We stopped in a biergarten for lunch.

A rather "suspicious" sign at the biergarten..

After this we stopped in front of the Reichstag building, and later visited the inside of the dome.

Our whole group in front of the Reichstag building, including our awesome guide Freddie.

The architecturally magnificent Reichstag Dome has a spiral ramp which grants you amazing views of Berlin, and the ability to see the reflective inner tower from many different viewpoints. As you make your way up, you can see the Victory Tower outside that commemorates a victory in the Franco-Prussian War (the French are still very upset that this tower is up, and succeeding in stealing a bit of it a few years ago), and an odd looking triangle that was a gift from the U.S., and many other important monuments. 

 

Another view where the TV tower is visible:

Fun fact: The top of the glass dome is completely open for the purpose of air circulation, and the inner tower acts as a giant bowl underneath the opening to catch any wind or snow. 
June 29:
Today was our final day in Berlin--the weekend trips go by so quickly. We started the day off in a flea market, which was a lot of fun to photograph, visited the East Side Gallery, saw the place where the Wannsee Conference was held, and then headed home to Prague.

Flea Market

I wish we could have spent more time there--local markets are so interesting--but seeing the East Side Gallery afterwards was amazing. The gallery is the longest remaining piece of the Berlin Wall, and is a memorial for freedom. Dozens of international artists were asked to come paint on it. There is also tons of graffiti on top, which I think makes it very authentic and more of an artifact of time. The way that it is constantly a work in progress to represent peace and freedom reminded me of the Lennon Wall back in Prague, but on a much larger scale.

My favorite part of the wall:

I do not know who this man is, but he temporarily graced this girl on our trip with stunning headgear.

After walking along the wall, we went over to the place where they held the Wannsee Conference, which is where the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was planned. This was a rather horrifying experience- mostly because the meeting itself was so cruel, but the place itself was so beautiful and the actual plans for the meeting were written out so casually.


The museum certainly did a thorough job of walking you through events leading up to the Wannsee Conference that a lot of us had never learned about before. One part that was particularly well done regarding the aftermath of the Holocaust was a display of quotes from living relatives to those involved. They did not just include relatives of former prisoners, but also those related to the Nazis and others who committed horrific acts, to show you how they deal with it on a day-to-day basis. 




Overall we had a really wonderful weekend, and I learned a lot about a city I did not have much previous knowledge of. We picked up a few German phrases, but admittedly not many, as we have our hands full trying to learn Czech.

Over the next few days I will post about more about Prague, and our weekends in Vienna, and Krakow!

Second Week v Praze! June 23-26

June 23:Today was the first day that was not booked with tours and things like that, and I don't have class on Mondays, so it was very nice to get to relax. My roommate and I sat in a cafe and created our own Prague bucket lists, planning out different ways to explore the city on our own terms. After attempting a trip to the grocery store I had my first daily humiliation, as I would come to call them. These are things that we have all learned to embrace...those moments where you walk in to a new place and accidentally do something ridiculous, or you cannot communicate with the workers at all and they laugh at you, or you get completely lost, or anything like that. There have certainly been plenty of them, but they are what makes living in Prague so interesting. And if you learn to laugh about them they can be a good source of entertainment. There will definitely be more to come about those (stay tuned for a fictional character, Esmeralda, experiencing them in poetry form in Austria).

June 24: Prague Castle Exploration and Classical Music
This morning, a friend and I went into Old Town to explore the Lobkowicz Palace Museum and attend the Daily Prague Castle classical concert. Well, since the concert is titled "Prague Castle" concert, we assumed it was up at the castle. However, after a lot of steps and a long time searching we were finally told, looking at a map, that we were "way up here" and we needed to go "downdowndowndowndown." So, we did just that, and explored a really awesome museum at the palace.

The Lobkowicz Family had all of their possessions taken during Communist Rule, and then the father was able to return after the Velvet Revolution and gain it back. There are 3 children who currently own the palace, and one of them did the audio tour. So it was really cool to hear it from a person actually in the family, and done in such an interesting manner. My favorite was seeing the painting of Maragarita Teresa, Infantina of Spain, who also appears in the famous painting Las Maninas. Apparently she had an arranged marriage at the age of 9 to her uncle (yuck), and then she died giving birth to her 4^th child before the age of 22. Poor girl, seriously.

It was interesting seeing the painting of the Defenestration of Prague-it was the moment that set off the Thirty Years’ War, when the Protestants came up to the Castle and actually threw the Catholics out the window. We then happened to learn about it in class the very same day. Apparently a couple of them survived the 70 foot fall due to a dung heap. 

The Dog Room, filled with dog portraits, was of course also my favorite even though it was pretty pretentious. Apparently the dogs were actually posing for the pictures. They were all decked out in their jewel collars and sitting on these fancy velvet seats. 

After the museum, we attended the concert, which featured a pianist and violinist from the Czech Philharmonic. With the exception of a little girl, we were by far the youngest ones in the audience, but we really enjoyed hearing such talented musicians play traditional classical pieces with what seemed like no effort at all.

This is a pretty short video, and unfortunately the violin player doesn't play much in it, but here's a clip of what it was like:

In the afternoon I attended my first class of Czech Culture and Civilization. I have two instructors who switch back and forth teaching, and we all feel sort of bad because one of them is phenomenal and the other is not good at all, so we really only pay attention when the really great lady lectures and tend to look at dog photos together when the other guy teaches. Anyway, we listened to our instructor cover 1,000 years of Czech history in 3 hours, which was pretty painful for everyone involved, but really, it is pretty cool being in a country where learning 1,000 years of history barely scrapes the surface.

This is a photo of our school, Charles University:

They have a piano in front, and almost every day you can hear someone insanely talented playing between classes.

After class a few of us got together and went to dinner in Old Town and then attended a free outdoor concert right outside the castle. This time it was the whole Czech Philharmonic. They were amazing, and there were many instruments that I've never even seen before. Watching them on the screen reminded me of watching the piccolo player from the Boston Pops on the 4th of July. There was even one woman with funny expressions that everyone kept laughing at (just like the piccolo player), but really she was quite good.

There was a whole audience in front of the screen, and obviously the actual stage, but this is the view from where we are sitting. The Castle isn't in the frame but it's to our right.

Walking back in the evening:

June 25:
Today we went to Wenceslas Square and visited the Museum of Communism. It was kind of sad and terrifying at the same time, but it was so interesting. After seeing all of the propaganda that this country was subjected to only a couple of decades ago, I saw why my professor gave us the advice that she did:  “doubt everything. Even self-doubt is healthy. I know it’s not very American.” She’s great.

We learned from the museum that in 1921, the Communist party strengthened significantly, and took advantage of the poverty and declining economy. The Germans in the Czech Republic looked up to Hitler, and Hitler looked to seize Sudetenland and then later, Czechoslovakia. In our class we are learning about events that we've learned all of our lives in history class, but now from a Czech perspective, and are learning how unfair it was for the Czechs. For instance, we learned that the Czech president was not invited to the Munich Agreement (nor consulted about its results), where Hitler was appeased and therefore able to seize Sudetenland, allowing him to later seize all of Czechoslovakia. 

There was phone tapping, censorship --the Czechs were completely in the dark about Western prosperity -- and the secret police only obeyed orders of the Communist Party, nobody else. Even peaceful criticism of politics resulted in punishment. There were executions and arrests based only on meetings discussing the political situation. One extraordinary woman who was both in the museum as well as mentioned in class today, was Milada Horáková. She was put on what was supposed to be a show trial, which were scripted trials during which people were forced to explain made-up stories and admit to crimes that they did not commit, but Horakova managed to state the truth. She was sentenced to death along with three of her colleagues after standing firm and sticking with her ideals completely. 

Jan Palach is a major Czech figure-at 21 years old, he set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in protest of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969. He pleaded that other students not follow his path, but stay alive and fight. 

We also saw a piece of the Berlin Wall, which was torn down in 1989 as citizens fought hard against the regime.

June 26: 
After class today my roommate and I did some exploring of Prague and walked what felt like manymany miles. We walked around Kampa Park first and then went to Petrin Hill, where you can see the best view of Prague.

Kampa Park

We went up the funicular to get to Petrin Hill. At the top, we were surprised to find that there there are miles of gardens, museums, restaurants, and even a giant stadium.

We conquered the 300 steps of the Observatory tower, which is built to look like a mini Eiffel tower. The tower was very clearly swaying in the wind, but the view was beautiful. You can see vineyards, houses, buildings, the castle, Charles University, the mountains, and all the way out into the country parts right outside the city.

 Charles University is visible across the bridge.

Once we were back at the bottom we had some traditional Czech sausages in New Town. We heard a band playing and saw that almost all of Wenceslas Square was blocked off, so we decided to watch and saw that it was some sort of military ceremony. All of these different types of soldiers marched into the square to the military band, and they all did different types of drill routines. I have no idea what it was for because the announcements were all in Czech, but it was pretty cool.

All over Prague, there are people who blow giant bubbles as a form of street performing. Here are are some of the soldiers somewhat gaping at the bubbles:

flybubblefly

In the evening we attempted to go to this place that claimed it was a restaurant with pumas outside, but alas, there were none. We tried to ask the waitress and she looked really really tired of the question. She motioned that they were sleeping somewhere outside. Well, we tried. The next day we journeyed to Berlin, which I will post about soon!