lunes, 7 de marzo de 2011

Berlin

The province of Malaga celebrated Semana Blanca last week and naturally we had a week off of school and a week of vacation time. I didn’t have any plans set for myself and I was invited to go to Berlin with three teachers from my school and my housemate Courtney. I should note that all of the teachers are women between ages 33 and 40 and I was a little hesitant about the idea of going on a vacation with only women, but I felt very comfortable with the group as we spend coffee break together every day, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity.
We rented an apartment in Berlin for 7 days and bought metro passes for a week so that we could travel around the city easily. I loved the metro system while we were there. We were able to travel throughout the entire city easily and quickly and see a lot of the city in any one day.  Berlin is a really fun city with a kind of alternative/artistic feel. When the Berlin wall was taken down a large amount of abandoned and poorly maintained buildings started to be converted into bars, discotecas, art galleries, and music studios. Many young artists started to move to Berlin to take advantage of the low price of living and focus on music and art. The majority of artists and musicians of Germany now reside in Berlin. All this was very apparent by the diverse style of the citizens, the number of alternative/dive bars, art galleries, public art and street musicians. To be honest it reminded me quite a lot of Portland, but on a grander scale: weird people, good beer, lots of music and lots of art. Instead of Mexican food Berlin has Turkish food. I would say the two cities are pretty comparable minus the tumultuous history of Berlin and its historical landmarks.
It was a great experience to see what remains of the Berlin wall and become better informed of the history behind it. It is shocking to think of all that the people of Germany had gone through during world war two and that about 15 years later they had to face another wall. I saw some pretty profound photos of people holding children up above the wall as the wall was being constructed in 1961 so that friends and relatives on the other side of the wall could see their children. Another photo I saw that was unbelievable to me was an aerial photo of the gate of Berlin and the wall in front of it, which is really two walls with about 30 meters in between that had barbed wire fences in case someone had jumped over one of the walls. I was most surprised by the year in which the photo was taken, 1988, which is not long ago at all. It was crazy to think that the city of Berlin, which belonged to Germany, remained divided between the western world and Russia.
I also visited a site of a former concentration camp which was pretty shocking. It was a concentration camp for work, not extermination, but it really was as close to hell as I can imagine.  The prisoners had to perform tasks such as test products for war and create armaments for the Nazis. The darkest parts of the concentration camp experience were the execution wall, crematoriums, and infirmary. In the Infirmary that we saw Nazi doctors sterilized people and performed medical experiments such as injecting viruses in people to observe the reactions and placing pieces of metal in people’s bodies to study infection. It was a very dark experience, but good to learn about history and recognize the horror that humans can create if not careful.
The trip overall was an incredible learning experience and reflecting on my trip the history I learned is what I value most, but while I was in Berlin my favorite things to do were drink good beers in awesome bars, eat loads of delicious sausages and gain a feel of the lifestyle of Berliners.  It was a really great experience.


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