No dryers and a trip to Berlin

Of view of Old Town from our balcony

Ok so now that I've started to settle in a little (I've been here three weeks on wednesday!), a few negative things have started to come out.  Namely, there are no freakin dryers here!  So yes, the already mundane task of washing your clothes becomes that much harder.  We have one washer for 5 guys, and two giant drying racks.  The washer takes about an hour, then you need to manually take the clothes piece by piece to the drying rack to dry (we have no laundry basket of course).  After roughly 6-8 hours, the clothes are dry and you can fold them.  It seriously takes all day long or parts of two days...annoying.  I admire the Europeans for their energy saving ways, but don't they know they are now greener more energy efficient dryers on the market?

Also, as promised a few pictures from our first couple weeks in Prague:

Old Town Square!

On a positive note.  We all traveled to Berlin this weekend, well everyone except Ian.  

Berlin was an absolutely fascinating city.  So much history, and literally every type of political ideals have been in Berlin over the past century.  The city has seen it all, and it's still there, strong as ever.  

Berlin has very humble beginnings when it was settled in 1273 as a sleepy fishing village.  It grew slowly until the late 19th century when Otto Von Bismarck unified the Germans and created Berlin the new republic's capital city.  In the next half-century, the city grew exponentially with all kinds of Germans and especially Jews flocking to the city in search of new opportunities.  

The famous Brandenberg Gate

Seen on the right is the Brandenberg Gate, which used to separate the Royal Palace from the Tiergarten (Berlin's Central Park), which used to be the Royal hunting ground.  The Berlin Wall used to be just on the other side of gate.  

We took an awesome free walking tour which showed us much of the city on Friday.   The pictures you see are just some of the things we saw on that tour.  Our excellent tour guide who shares my name took us through the heart where we saw the American embassy, the Reichstag (German parliament) where Hitler's supporters started a fire in the 30's in order to gain national support, the Holocaust memorial, Museum Island and Checkpoint Charlie.

The US embassy, completed in 2008

 The Nazis started the fire and blamed a communist.  Hitler then approached the President (he was Chancellor in those days) about a power in which he could control everything for four years in case of emergency.  The President signed off on it, and the rest is emblazoned in an unfortunate chapter of Germany's history.

Germany does a very good job of educating their youth regarding the Holocaust.  The swastika is outlawed and the community shuns anyone with any sort of anarchist feelings.  They keep up many of the Nazi buildings as a reminder, but Hitler's former bunker they are clearly trying to forget.  Where the building once stood is now a very forgetful parking lot in the shadow of two apartment buildings.  The only source of remembrance is a plaque which shows the structure and some history of it, and even that was only placed there in 2006 for the World Cup.

All of us inside the memorial

The Holocaust memorial, more aptly named, the memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was incredibly eery and moving.  The memorial, designed by celebrated Jewish American architect Peter Eisenman, is meant to be abstract and confusing.  It is roughly 2700 grey concrete rectangles that could represent a number of different things, but I took it as gravestones.  A reminder to the German people how many innocent lives were taken.  It is right in the middle of the city and was meant to be a daily reminder to the German people of a grim part of their history.  One interesting tidbit is that a company was brought it to apply an anti-graffiti substance to the memorial.  No big deal right?  Wrong.  This was the same company that had supplied gas to the Nazis that was then used in concentration camps to murder Jews.  Obviously this outraged the Jewish community, and to subside the anger, the company decided to apply the substance for free.  It cost them 2.43 million euros.  A excellent gesture in my opinion that while mistakes can never be fully corrected, the next generation can always do more.

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall were other amazing exhibits.  Really hard to believe that a wall separated a city for 28 years. The Wall was actually in place to keep East Berliners out of West Berlin, where they could escape to their freedom and not meant to enclose West Berlin as a prison (west berliners could actually leave if they wanted to). And it was even more amazing to discover that the wall was erected overnight.  Families and friends were split, and East Berliners were subjugated to a life of oppression until the wall's celebrated demolition in 1989.  

Hitler's speech steps

The 3.5 hour tour seemed to drag on a little, but after a coffee break we were back on the trail.  We walked around Museum island (yes mom and dad we did visit two museums in Berlin).  And saw several of the older historical buildings in Berlin, they were gorgeous!  Probably the most surreal moment in Berlin came when we saw the steps where Hitler delivered most of his propaganda speeches from.  I went up to the spot he most likely stood and soaked it in.  While the space below looks calm and peaceful now, it is crazy to think that only 65-70 years earlier, this was a square filled with so much hate and deception.  Really was wild.

What Hitler saw

We finished our tour and after a few beers at an awesome restaurant, we went to the Germany History museum and back to our hostel to rest.  

Saturday was a little more low key.  We walked through the Tiergarten and did the Jewish History museum, the biggest in europe. 

The nightlife was great. Friday night was a relative bust, but Saturday night we did the biggest pub crawl ever (over 200 people) and ended up at Club Matrix, which was a lot of fun.

 Brian, Dblock, and Blake left early Sunday morning, but Paige and I had a bus that left at 3 p.m. so we were able to walk around the city Sunday.  I promised to take Paige shopping then but everything was closed haha.  She took it in stride and I promised to go shopping with her next time we travel together.

When we finally boarded the bus, I was exhausted and ready to go home to Prague.  But it was a fantastic trip, and I highly recommend Berlin to any traveler who finds themselves in Europe.

Ok so this was the longest post ever and I thank you all for reading it all.  I had some catching up to do, especially on the pictures, and I hope now to more regularly update the blog as to not make posts that take 20 minute to sift through.

Until next time,

Sam