A Trip Down History Lane...

So we finally arrived in Berlin at 11:00 at night, just enough time to take the U-bahn (Berlin's version of the metro/underground) half way to our destination. Tragic. At midnight we got kicked off the U-bahn. Luckily we figured out how to catch a cab to our hostel, St. Christopher's (which is a really good one, if you ever are looking for a place to stay in Berlin).

In the morning, we had the hostel-provided breakfast and went to hunt for a free walking tour (these tours are ACTUALLY free and can be found is most major tourist-attracting cities; the guides are trained and very passionate historians and are paid by tips collected at the end of the tour). We stopped at the Brandenburg gate to scope out the tour.


There were quite a few people waiting for the tour so they split us up among several tourguides, some that spoke in Spanish others in French, others in German, etc... I was really impressed that they were so well prepared and organised for a free service!

The free tour was incredibly extensive and lasted a good couple hours. Not only that, it was incredibly well-led and interesting! Our tourguide, George, took us all over the main city (be warned, a lot of walking is done, but it's worth it!)

One of our first stops was this stunning memorial:

The tour also takes you to part of the remains of the Berlin wall, Hotel Adlon (where many presidents have stayed and where Michael Jackson held his baby out of a window), Checkpoint Charlie, the university, various monuments and memorials, the old Nazi headquarters, where Hitler is actually buried (what a surprise!) and other pieces of history. The stops are brief, but the tourguides are thorough and well-educated to tell you what you need.

Hotel Adlon (and our guide, George, with crazy-cool facial hair!)

Checkpoint Charlie, the most well-known crossing point through the Berlin Wall

Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral)

Nazi Headquarters

Nazi Party mural: crazy stuff, eh?

Everything you need to know about the city was basically covered on the tour; it's an excellent way to whet your appetite if you're a history nerd like me. After getting a dose of the city's past while looking at the places where these things actually occurred, even the map started to look different to me.

Trying to understand the history of WWII in relation to the city and the German people was something I'd also wondered about and even that was covered in the tour. It wasn't just the Jews and the Roma people that lived in fear of the Nazi regime; normal German civilians did too! They were forced to join or become the enemy of the party. It was amazing to see the city become a symbol of good's triumph over evil (even though the good comes with kitschy gift shops and parades of fat tourists, it's still a much better step forward that what could have been). Little did I know that a few months later I would be stepping into Austria's Auschwitz, an area of Europe that received tenfold the amount of collateral damage from the holocaust. The free tour was a priceless introduction to the tour I took in the concentration camp at Auschwitz and Birkenau. So much emotional and spiritual dimension was added to my study abroad experience thanks to a few hours lent to history. It made my trip to Europe worth much more.

Oh... you were probably wondering what that last picture was... let's have a look at it again:

Hitler is buried there... yes, underneath a parking lot. George, our guide, told us that nazi-loyalists have tried to recover his remains; the UN knew this would be happening, so they decided to rest Hitler in an inconspicuous and rather unglorified area. Speaking of unglorified, locals walk their dogs to this lot to let their canines do their business.

Following our tour, we hit the city for some foodventures! I'll let my fellow foodies have a look at my documentation here, and spare everyone else the delicious details. ;)

Berlin, like other major cities, is home to tons of awesome museums! I got my fix of Sandro Botticelli and really eclectic musical instruments in the museum districts. There's even an "island" in the middle of the city called "Museum Island," home to the Pergamon, Bode-Museum and Altes Museum.

I was a fan of the Gemäldegalerie because they had this and other Botticellis:

The Musikinstrumenten was quite the interesting place. Filled with crazy pianos, guitars, see-through violins, it's an Eden for the musical nerd.

How would you even begin to play that?!

In a more obscure part of the main city is another great museum, the Jüdisches Museum. This one's about Jewish culture and the people; there are details about the holocaust, but the exhibits choose to focus on the entire history of Jewish people as well as what life is like today for them. Observe one of my favourite parts of the museum: the assorted yarmulkes!

Yes, they have a Friends yarmulke... WIN.

Now, no trip to Germany is complete without sampling some of the country's beer, right?

This wheat beer is frequently mixed with lemonade (or what we in the U.S. would call lemon Minute Maid) and that's probably why I liked it so much. (Want more about German food?) It was light in body, but had an excellent wheat taste, not too heavily tasting of alcohol either.

And of course, what is a visit to a European city without hitting up their chocolate shops?

Fassbender and Rauch was the main chocolatier in Berlin, claiming to be the "World's Largest Chocolate House." For the scoop on the different wursts/sausages, you'll have to hit my food blog. :)

Stay tuned for more Europe!

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Blogging location: Ruminating on memories in the good ol' flat... and ignoring my coursework... a little. Also sporting spectacles... There's a story to this for Lisbon. But that's later.


The canals in this city are gorgeous. The Dutch houses are also really quaint and the staircases are rather treacherous because of how small and tall they are (imagine only being able to fit half your foot on each step). The Dutch are supposedly some of the tallest people in the world, so houses have high ceilings, making the staircases even longer, steeper and more scary to climb.
Unfortunately, Amsterdam does have it's reputation (I will get to this soon). The city centre seems to lack even the tacky traditional culture. Everywhere I looked, the restaurants and stores all were themed with some other culture (for Australia, I guess they couldn't think of anything or couldn't sell vegemite to the local community, so they just have ice cream shops called "Australia"). I rarely saw anything Dutch! It was so different from the other places I'd been before. We had to rummage through the city to find local markets that sold cheese to get our Dutch on. Anyways, enough of globalisation...


Cheese
Cheese, glorious cheese.
My favourite souvenir from this entire trip has actually been from Amsterdam and it is the spade-shaped tool you see in the photo above... a cheese slicer! It says "Holland" on it, so that justified me buying it. That and we needed it for lunch because we went downtown on one of those cheese booths at a street market and we had nothing to eat it with. We bought two types of cheese, one spiced with cumin and another with various herbs such as parsley and oregano (hey, we're in Amsterdam, so that might not have been all the "herbs" put into the cheese... but I didn't feel funny afterwards, which is a good sign).
How was the cheese, you ask? Delicious! Europe in general has amazing cheese, and I'm a huge fan, so I figured I'd try cheese everywhere I could. The cumin cheese was half way in between a cheddar and brie texture, so more difficult to slice, but just as delicious as the herb-cheese.


The Redlight District
It was what I thought it would be. The street was just like the others with street lamps, but the rest of the night was illuminated by fluorescent glows of a seeping red, neon green, tacky purple and electric blue. We popped over on a Sunday night, which was relatively empty, but we did see the prostitutes sitting in the windows (I had seen an art exhibit earlier this year in London where a couple remade the Redlight District out of mannequins). Most of them were texting on their Blackberries. A few were gyrating and doing their thing, but for the most part, Sunday night wasn't a busy one for anybody. What hit me was actually looking into the eyes of these women: they're real people. I know this is obvious, but remove yourself from the computer monitor and go there yourself to get a grasp of the reality. Are eyes not the window to the soul?
These women selling themselves are just like me and just like you. They have families-- they didn't just pop out of the ground. They have friends-- they weren't made in a factory. They're people-- they go grocery shopping and pay bills just like everybody else. If you saw one of these girls in a convenience store, having no idea of her job, and she asked you for the time, you would tell her it was a quarter-to and not think anything else. These women have histories before and after you've spotted them in their windows, regardless of how quickly you look away. What separates us from them is how they see themselves and their bodies.
I actually had the opportunity-- whether this is a good or bad one is your decision-- to see a man stop at a window to watch the lady in the window beckon him forward, contemplate for a while, and then march straight into one of those buildings. My stomach twisted itself and jerked a bit. Something about the way he strode through that door seemed very inhuman. If you had seen him walk into a library that way, it would have made you wonder what sort of books he had in mind. A lot about this wasn't right and I didn't just feel that way because of my conscious. The aura was all wrong. Somewhere along the line something went wrong in the way we humans have decided the acceptable level of respect with which to treat each other and ourselves.

On another note, more sites!
We went and saw the Van Gogh Museum the morning after our evening peruse around the town and it was fantastic even though there wasn't a student discount... Highly recommend it.
"... to paint 'what I am not yet able to, in order to learn how to do it'" - Van Gogh


We also ventured to the Anne Frank House (not her actual house, but the house that she and her family hid in during the Holocaust). While the house has been preserved extremely well, Otto Frank, Anne's father requested that the rooms be left empty of any original furniture. Some of the photos that Anne pasted to her bedroom walls are still there and the height markings that her mother made of her and her sister are there as well. Unfortunately, photos could not be taken inside the museum.


Well, anyways, that's about all I have time for at the moment. I'm leaving for Poland early tomorrow, so I have to catch some shut eye. I will probably add more to this entry, but I just wanted to post something for you to read. ;)
Thanks for the continued prayers!
Toodles!
RxW