Wir sind nach Berlin und Amsterdam gefahren!

Just this past week we took our second group trip. This time to Berlin and Wittenberg. We were meeting at 8:45 in the main train station. I was late by a few minutes. I actually just got there as they were heading to the platform! (Of course, Frau Steding was going to stay behind and wait a few minutes for me) Anyways, after the ride to Berlin we got a quick introduction to the transportation system and later followed by a quick tour of the surrounding area. The next day the our group went to the Siegessäule. It is basically a victory memorial/tower thing that was adjusted to include three victories.

Siegessäule

We then we to the Jewish Museum were we received an interesting from an enthusiastic tour guide. However, he did know what he was talking about and gave us a lot of history on even the most minor things. That night Marcus and I went our exploring and ran across the Fernsehturm (TV tower) and Brandenburger Tor.

Fernsehturm lite up in green.

Brandenburger Tor all lite up at night

The next morning we got a walking tour from a Berlinerin. She did a wonderful job. There was lots of interesting facts and she spoke slowly and with simple words so that we could all easily understand here. Our tour lead from Alexanderplatz to Brandenburger tour.

Standing in front of the Tor after our tour.

On Monday we went to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. I really don't know how to describe it. There wasn't much there in way of the barracks, but they did still have a the machine gun trench that was used to murder the prisoners. Standing in that trench, where one would have stood just before being shot dead, was sad, erie, scary, and a million other emotions I can't even begin to describe all mixed into one.


That Afternoon I decided to brighten up the afternoon by going to the Berliner Mauer memorial on the north side of Berlin. Oh, and Marcus came along too but I got the feeling he was only there for the currywurst we would be getting later. ;-) At the memorial, they had a display of sorts that showed what the wall would have look like when it was intact. It was interesting standing on either side (West, East) of the wall and getting a feeling of what it was like for the citizens.

Looking through the crack on the east side of the wall into no-man's-land

After the memorial we went and had the "Best Currywurst in Berlin" as advertised by the Berlinerin who gave us the tour a few days ago.


Tuesday morning was Museum day. That is we get to pick a museum of our choice to go to. Since I was still craving information I decided to go to Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. The Museum had a lot of information about the events leading up the the Berliner Mauer. However the exhibits slowly turned into a big collection of escape stories. One has to search around a bit to find further information on the wall...until they reach the 1980's of course. Then the exhibits shift to the tearing down of the wall, as expected (They also had a complete exhibit on Ronald Reagan including personal life, domestic policy, etc). Overall the Museum was good, but it wasn't good as I was hoping it was going to be.

Checkpoint Charlie

For our last day in Berlin we toured Hochschönhausen, a political prisoner camp run by the Stasi. Our tour covered a lot over the Stasi, their interrogation methods, among other things. However, seeing this makes me feel a little worse for the citizens of the DDR who constantly have the Stasi looking over their shoulders.


The last three days of our trip we spent in Wittenberg. It is a nice little town but I am definitely preferable to Berlin. During our three days we saw the Lutherhaus, the door Luther nailed his 95 theses to, a DDR museum which highlighted home life in the DDR, Hundretwasserschule, and the Elbe (We actually walked over it). The last day we were there, we participated in a service project. I helped out in the Luthergarten repairing tree supports and doing some weeding.


Well that covers most of what we did. Now we are off on Spring Break. First Paris, Normandy, Salzburg, Munich, Bacharach, then Münster. Should be loads of fun.


Until next time,
Jake

Stätte der Bärn und Luther

We just got back yesterday from a trip to Berlin and Wittemberg. It was a ten day trip all in all, so there is a lot to talk about. Here are some highlights.

One of the first places we went in Berlin is the Sankt Michaelis Gedächtniskirche. It's a church that got bombed in WWII, but they decided not to repair it but instead to keep it as a monument. Unfortunately, the famous part about this church, the tower with a hole in it, is under construction right now, so it is completely hidden from view by scaffolding. However, they did add two pieces to it, one of which is in the picture below. From the outside they look like really boring ugly concrete buildings with lots of little windows. From the inside, however, they look like this:

Sankt Michaelis Gedächtniskirche

After that, we went to the huge department store KaDeWe and looked at the food there. It is a high class department store, so all of the food is really fancy. Plus the food section is huge. After that we were done with everything planned for the day, so Jake and I went walking around and eventually made it back to the hostel, eating some curry wurst on the way there.

The next day we started off by going to the Siegessäule. It is a really big monument from the 19th century that was built to celebrate the victory of three separate wars. It was not initially planned this way, but they kept on having more victories, so they kept on adding to the monument. The picture below is not very indicative of how large the thing actually is. It's right in the middle of a huge roundabout and would be several stories high. We went up inside and climbed up to the top. Once you get up there, you realize that it it one of the highest things in Berlin.

The Siegessäule. It's pretty neat.

After this, we went off to the center of Berlin, ate, and then went to the Jewish museum. We had a tour there, but before it started, we had a while to sit around. So some of us wandered a little bit in the garden right behind the museum. It was kind of cool although it would have been much better if the fountains were working. The tour was interesting mostly because our guide was kind of strange. He was very into the architecture of the place and how it makes you feel. He talked quite a lot, but we somehow did not actually cover all that much. He seemed very knowledgeable, jut a little different and kind of distractable.

The garden of the Jewish museum.

After this, we were done with the day's planned activities so, again, Jake and I went off to explore the city. This time we saw quite a lot more. We walked all around the downtown, seeing the Brandenburger Tor, lots of bit of wall stuff (like in the next picture), the Bundestag, Potsdammer Platz, Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden, the memorial to the murdered Jews of the holocaust, and some other things. The Jew memorial was interesting because we did not actually know what it was until we got to the other side and saw a sign. All we knew at first was that there were small paper signs on wooden posts saying "enter at your own risk." This did not seem like the most inviting thing, and the steles looked a lot like tombs in the dark. Also, it was not possible to tell what the ground was doing, so walking through it was very much surprising as you could never see what you were about to come across.

Me standing right over the border of east and west Germany!

 We also saw some of the little sections of wall that are scattered all over the city. Here is one with a more modern political statement:

"Next wall to fall wall street" painted on a section of the Berlin wall at Potsdammer Platz

The next day we started by getting a walking tour of some of the more famous parts of the city. It was in simple German, done by a Berliner and former Luther student. It was very interesting, and it seemed to go pretty fast. We started in Alexanderplatz and worked our way through Nikolaiviertel, the reconstructed "old city," down the Museuminsel, Unter den Linden, and finally we ended at the Brandenburger Tor. She seemed very knowledgeable and even told Jake where to find the best curry wurst in Berlin. We were not disappointed when we went there.

The memorial to fallen soldiers (at least that's how I understood it). It's kind of neat because right above the sculpture is a hole in the ceiling, so when it rains, the lady cries.

After the tour we went over and had a tour of the memorial to the murdered Jews of the Holocaust. It is a very interesting memorial, shown in the next picture, with a little museum below the ground. Something that picture does not really portray is that the ground is sloped so that in the middle, the concrete blocks are around 20 feet tall. Also, no two blocks are the same. They are all different heights and they all are tipped just a little bit.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of the Holocaust.

After this, we went to see a Blue Man Group show. It was very entertaining, although we did have to pay a bit extra for it.

Herr Steding got a group picture of us with this guy, but this is the only picture I have of the entire deal. It was pretty funny.

The next day we went to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. It wasn't very good, I thought, because everything was gone. All we did was walk around and listen to dry descriptions of what was there. That afternoon we had free though, so Jake and I went wandering around more. We had to get the best curry wurst in Berlin of course, so we wandered up in that direction. Jake had also found out from our tour guide where some sections of the wall are still standing. They were in the area, so we walked by those as well. On the way there, however, in a kind of seedy looking industrial yard sort of place, we found this:

Some chunks of Berlin Wall with world dictators on them. Of course two of these are no more.

This day we had the morning to go to a museum of our choice. Jake and I and some others chose to go to the Checkpoint Charlie museum. It ended up being not very much about wall or GDR stuff, which was disappointing, and instead mostly about escape attempts, with a random wall that was devoted to Picasso and modern art. The others went through the museum really quickly, so after that we went alone to see some other things. We went to a memorial to the Berlin Airlift, the Ritter Sport store, and some other chocolate store which had really ornate chocolate sculptures of various Berlin landmarks. That evening we met up with the rest of the group for a tour of the Reichstag building (the capitol building). That was really interesting although I still don't really understand German politics.

The Reichstag building.

The next day we went to Hohenschönhausen, a former Stasi prison. It was pretty interesting and, unlike Sachsenhausen, there was actually a prison to see still. After that, we had the rest of the day to do what we wanted. Everyone else was doing lame things like going shopping, so we decided to go to a landmark that we had not yet seen that was listed on the map, and to walk back to the hostel from there. I think it ended up being about 10 miles or so, although I'm only saying this based on how my feet felt by the end. On the way, we saw the East Side Gallery (picture below), various famous landmarks again, and the Tiergarten at night. The East Side Gallery is a section of wall that has been preserved and now is used as an art gallery. Various artists are given a chunk of wall to use as their canvas and they can do anything they want on it. I believe it is redone every year. Just outside the Tiergarten we saw two street performers. Instead of playing instruments, though, they were spinning and juggling fire in front of cars stopped at a red light. It was pretty cool although they didn't seem to be making much.

A bit of East Side Gallery. It says "He who wants the world to say how it is doesn't want the world to stay." The full gallery is perhaps half a mile or so long.

The next day we went to Wittemberg. We took an ICE train there. Those are really cool because they are more modern than the others and they go extremely fast. This one got up to 200 kph. Once in Wittemberg, we got a tour of the city. This was again done by a very knowledgeable guide, who, despite the tiny size of the city, managed to give an almost 3 hour tour that was very interesting.

Here is us on the tour being told about the public water system that still exists after 500 years.

The next day we went to the DDR Museum in Wittemberg. It was interesting. It consists basically of different rooms from a house furnished as they would have been in Wittemberg in each decade since the 20's. This tour was entirely in German.

A Nena poster from the Wittemberg Geschichte Museum. This is part of the furnishing of the room supposed to be for a teenager in the 80's.

That afternoon we went to a school that was remodeled according to the plans by the architect Hudertwasser. It is thus appropriately known as the Hundertwasser Schule. It is kind of interesting architecture to some people I guess, but it was still just a couple of blocks, so I thought it was pretty boring.

The next day we did a service project. We had a choice between weeding and taking care of a garden or dusting out an old church tower. To me, there was no debate: I most certainly did not want to breath in gallons full of dust. So we took care of this garden. It is actually called the Luthergarten because it is in honor of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which is happening in 2017 (because of this the whole town of Wittemberg is currently experiencing a sort of face-lift). But this garden is special because it will have 500 trees. Each tree will be donated as part of a partnership with 500 other churches of all denominations all over the world. We got to weed around the trees and hedges.

The other group, as I said, was dusting out a 500 year old church tower. After we both finished, we all went up in the tower to see the city. This is not something that is normally allowed for the public. It turns out that until the 30's there was actually a family living up at the top. For quite a while, it was their job to watch over the city and ring the bells if there was ever a fire. But living at the top of a church tower couldn't have been easy. They had to bring everything up and down, for instance, using a hand-winch. Also, the children would only go down for the first time when they were four or five years old. Then they would be amazed at how large the world really is.

The church tower.

After this we had the rest of the afternoon free. I really wanted to walk over to the next town which I had seen from the church tower, and Jake and Jennifer were willing to join. So we did just that. There wasn't much to see there, but it was kind of cool all the same.

A cool little roundabout seen from the top of a little hill-park.

We met up again at about 6:00 to go to eat. The program was paying for a traditional German meal at a nice restaurant. It was very good and it was kind of fun to just sit around and talk with everyone. After that, because Kirk just got the urge, a few of us watched O Brother Where Art Thou on Youtube.

A cool little roundabout seen from the top of a little hill-park. I don't know what's going on with the bottom bit of this picture. Blogger is being really mean today.

The next day, Sunday, we left at about 9:00. We arrived back in Münster at about 4:00. Es war schön.

Bis später,

Marcus

Komm, wir fahren nach Amsterdam

So last week someone decided to go to Amsterdam. It sort of became a group thing with eight of us going total. We left Thursday evening and stayed till Saturday afternoon. The idea was to go to the city without really having specific plans and to just experience the place. That was done.
Amsterdam is known for two things in most of the rest of the world: the coffee shops and the red light district. Red light district is fairly widely understood, but the coffee shops perhaps not. If you want to drink coffee in Amsterdam you don't go to a coffee shop, you go to a cafe. Coffee shops sell coffee, but their main attraction is the weed. This means that many places in the city smell very strongly of such stuff. There are coffee shops all over, including two doors down from our hostel.
Enough of that though. I'm going to talk a little about what we did and then let Jake fill in more details as he wants. We got to Amsterdam at 9:30 or so I believe. It was after dark. Nobody seemed to have a very good idea of where the hostel was, but there were maps outside the train station. The people there are very nice, and while we were looking at the map, some guy from the US stopped and asked if we needed help. About ten minutes after we started walking, I noticed a guy up ahead of us that had just walked out of an alley. This wouldn't be too concerning except that he was not only very disreputable looking, but he started watching us and, once we passed him, started following us. My host family had told me a lot about how Amsterdam has very good criminals, so I watched him very closely the whole time. He followed us for a while, doing a pretty good job at it I think. He was certainly experienced enough to know what he was doing. Luckily, once we turned onto a side street he detached himself and we never saw him again.
The rest of the trip was significantly less nerve-wracking. The hostel was hard to find because it was just a not-well-marked door between a restaurant and a bar.

Our Hostel. I think we were all expecting it to actually have a sign marking it.

 It was very nice for the price considering breakfast was included. The next day, the others wanted to go to the Van Gogh museum. I thought this sounded interesting until I heard it costed €14. That was the end of my interest there. Fortunately, Jake felt similarly, so we went to the city Canal House museum. It is a canal house that was donated to the city in the late 19th century by a very rich family to be a museum. It was pretty cool and much cheaper.

The garden outside the canal house.

 After that we had a lot of time before the planned meeting time, so we wandered around Amsterdam. One of our finds was a really neat cheese shop. It had lots of samples of Dutch cheese (very good), so we ate many of those.

The cheese shop. Pretty neat, pretty yummy.

 We wandered a little bit more and, near the harbor, found this:

A playground on a barge. It was very enjoyable.

That night we went to a bar cause that's what everyone else likes to do. It was pretty boring. They eventually decided to go find another place. We ended up at the place right next to our hostel, which is extremely loud and dancy, so I went and showered. I happened to come back just as they were planning on leaving for a coffee shop. Neither Jake nor I wanted to go to one of those, so we wandered the city some more. That is a very enjoyable thing in the dark.
The next day, we checked out of the hostel and went to a market. It was pretty cool and had lots of cheese and spices. Then we went to a little park (actually the largest on the map). It was kind of nice and was a neat juxtaposition between nature and city. However, the paths were paved and wider than many two-way roads, so it was kind of over-developed I though.

From the park, I'm not sure what this is exactly, but it has the three red x's. Those have apparently been a kind of symbol for Amsterdam for centuries.

After the park, we went to eat. Nick, Jake, Kirk, and I ended up at one of the ubiquitous 5-euro Italian restaurants. It was actually pretty good. When the others decided to go see the red-light district, the same group decided to go to the Amsterdam museum to get a bit of history. We ran out of time there, but it was interesting. After that, we met at the train station to go home. Neat neat.

Bis später,
Marcus

Burgen und Schlösser und Hamburg!

Since Marcus did such a good job of summing up our trip, I thought I would highlight the areas that particularly interested me (And no, this will not me a post dedicated to Miniatur Wunderland, although that would be entirely possible).

As Marcus mentioned, my host mother took us to different Castles around Münster. These were all really cool, and they all featured moats!

Versailles!!! Well the one of Westfalen at least!

Skipping ahead to Monday morning and Miniatur Wunderland. I seriously believe that I could have spent the entire day in there and would not have been bored. It really is much, much more then a model train world, even though that was the basis for it all. It has grown to include car/traffic system, a functional airport, and a harbor (using real water mind you). I stood and looked at the the first two displays for about 45 minutes...until I realized that I only had about an hour left and 5 or 6 more displays to look at, each more intricate then the next! I was able to make it through all of them, however, my camera died 2 displays in. Here are some of the better pictures I managed to get.

Multiple what you see here by 50, and that may be the size of the entire "Wunderland".

I forgot to mention there was a day/night time cycle. Here is a street party at night.

A look from the a model's perspective.

And let's jump ahead to Tuesday when we attended the Maritime Museum. Well I will step back a few hours. Before going to the Museum, Nick mentioned that there was a WWII U-boat base along the river. Jackie and I bit. Unfortunately it was too foggy to see across the river that day, so we wasted a few hours on that.

The Maritime Museum was pretty cool. I was sad that I along had two hours to get through 10 stories of Maritime history. Moving quickly, I was able to catch up with Marcus and Jennifer. We rushed through the rest of the stories just in time to see the largest miniature ship collection. Something like 40,000 ships or more.

One of the many interesting things at the Maritime Museum: A giant ship made out of Legos!

Well, I am going to stop there. Those were the things I found MOST interesting. I would like to write about everything, but that blog post would be far too long and Marcus already hit the highlights of the trip.

I was planning on posting this yesterday, but going through the enormous amounts of pictures I have, took quite longer than expected.

Bis bald,
Jake

Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg

Last Saturday, Jake's host mother took he and I to see some castles nearby Münster. That was pretty neat.
Last Sunday, we left for Hamburg. And now I'll go through some of the highlights with a couple of pictures.
We ended up in a very nice hostel owned by Generator Hostels. It is very new, just opened last summer, so very clean as well. The first day we took a tour of the city on a bus, a Stadtrundfahrt. The guide did not perform very well and was very hard to understand, but we still saw a lot of the city. That night, Kirk, Jake, Eve, and I ended up eating at a really neat little Afghan and Indian restaurant just down the street from our hostel.

The little restaurant. They also had a sitar and some other cool instruments near one of the other couch table places

The next day we went to the Miniature Wonderland. It's the largest model train-base-world in the world. All of the models are extremely intricate and lifelike. It was very cool.

Here is a moving model of a theater performing Romeo und Julia someplace in Germany. There are many more pictures of this place on Facebook.

After the miniature awesomeness, we went on a guided tour of Hamburg that focused on Jews. We went to several locations were there used to be Jewish houses or synagogues. Unfortunately, most of the synagogues in the city were destroyed in the war. Many of the houses previously owned by Jews were also taken away from them, sold, or demolished.

This is where we ended the tour. It is a very old Jewish theater which is apparently very well-known. Right now it seems they are playing Frost/Nixon.

On Tuesday, we started off by going to a really big, well known church: St. Michael's Kirche. It is fairly large, fairly new, and has five organs, one of which is above the ceiling. They have a little organ concert there every day at noon, but I was not able to be there for that. There were lots of tours going on, but we did not take one. There were also old lady guards walking around telling people to not do things. I got yelled at for taking a picture of some stone box. Another old lady was much nicer. She walked up to Jennifer and I and started telling us about the history and building of the church. Unfortunately, we had to go and neither of us felt comfortable interrupting her. Luckily Frau Steding realized what was happening and saved us.

The largest organ at St. Michael's Kirche. I really wish I could have heard it play.

After the church, we went to take a tour of the Rathaus, the city hall. Hamburg is more than just a city-it is a city-state. That means it is also it's own province of which the mayor is also governor. The city hall is very big and ornate like a state capitol in the US.

A room in the Rathaus that I think is used by the mayor guy. The book in the glass case on the left is a special golden book that each mayor writes their name in during their swearing in sort of ceremony. However, in case they make a mistake and swear in the wrong person, or if the person turns out to be bad, the book is just loose sheets of paper so they can remove the person's name without defacing the book.

Tuesday afternoon we had to opportunity to go to any of the museums we wanted to in Hamburg. I, along with most of the rest of the group, decided to go to the Maritime Museum. Hamburg is, after all, the second biggest port in Europe and the museum is one of the largest in the world. Jake, Jennifer, and I ended up going through most of the museum before they made an announcement telling us to leave. It was very large but much more interesting than I expected.

Here is a very large model of a ship hanging from the ceiling. It was about a story and a half tall.

 On Wednesday, we took the train to Sylt. It was about a three hour ride each way. A very popular vacation place for Germans, mostly the richer people, Sylt is an island that is the farthest north point in Germany. It is very nice and has a couple of pretty little towns. When we were there it was very foggy most of the day: we could not see the full three blocks of the main road at one time. I really enjoyed the weather though. Most people go to Sylt to go to the beach. We did that, but of course did not go swimming in the cold. It was a fairly nice place.

The main road through the town Westerland in the middle of Sylt. This is about halfway to the beach, but with the fog it is just barely possible to make out the gate.

 For the first half of Thursday we went to the Hamburg museum. The primary goal in this was to check out the exhibit "Jews in Hamburg" for Paideia. I spent about the first hour we had there going through the rest of the museum, then finally went to the Jews exhibit. Once I got there and started taking notes I realized I would have to stay quite a bit longer than our planned time. Luckily, they gave us the afternoon to do whatever we wanted. Jennifer, Jake and I ended up staying there until about two in the afternoon-two hours longer than originally planned.

The Jew star badge that Jews had to wear during the second world war. This museum had a lot to read about Jews. Luckily, most of the lengthier portions were also in English.

 That afternoon we were able to do whatever we wanted. Since everyone else had already left, Jake, Jennifer and I ended up walking around the city. We saw quite a lot of Hamburg that we had not seen much of before including the Hafen. It was pretty neat.

The Lion King playhouse. It is on an island with no bridges, meaning the only way to get there is by ferry. During the day, there are boats going over there about once every ten minutes. The Lion King has been playing in Hamburg for about ten years straight.

It is possible to go out a little bit into the Hafen on big docks that the touristy boats use. There are neat bridges that you can walk out there on.

One of those bridges. This went to a dock with a large restaurant boat on it. We weren't sure if we were allowed on, but there wasn't a sign saying we weren't and there was no fence, so Jake and I checked it out.

That evening, I convinced Jake to join me walking around the city in the dark. I had wanted to do this every night so far, but nobody ever wanted to join me. We started off walking to the lake to take pictures of the buildings. Then we decided to walk around the lake, then we decided to to to the Hafen.

Here's the same bridge at night. It was a little creepier, but seemed very peaceful now that there were no longer ferries and other boats constantly crossing the channel. When we went back across the bridge there was also a couple that thought they were alone on the bridge.

 Everything looks different in the city at night. It was very enjoyable to see it that way. By the time we go to the Hafen it was about 1:30 am.

Here's the Lion King building after everyone left.

We finally ended up walking back towards the Hostel. We took a different route than normal, so we saw lots of little dark shops and very few people.

The Hauptbahnhof. As we were standing here, a few emergency vehicles suddenly started racing up to a nearby street. We looked over and there was some guy laying on the ground. We decided to leave.

We ended up getting back at about 2:30 am. Everyone else was asleep. The next day, all of the guys went and wandered around for a few hours after breakfast. The girls did the same but I think they went shopping. We left at about 12:40 I believe and got back to Münster at around 3:30.
When I got back here, my host family was about to leave to go to my host father's mother's birthday party. They asked if I wanted to come along, so I did. It was interesting, but very hard to understand everyone when there were several people speaking at once. When we got back I did some email checking and picture uploading.
Now I think it is time to finish up my homework for Monday.

Bis Später,
Marcus