Germany

So this one time I took a trip to Germany.

We left on Wednesday afternoon, took a train to London Paddington, transfered by the underground to Liverpool St., and then took another train to Stanstead Airport. I say all of this because I'm really getting proficient at public transportation. Trains, subways, buses, and walking. And sometimes planes. I'm now pretty good at all of them.

So anyways, we got the the airport, checked in, and went through security. Security and immigrations seem to be a normal part of life now. After that, we got on a plane, and went to Berlin, Germany. After arriving around 9, we walked to the train station, took the train, and walked to our hostel, a process that took about two hours, and we got in around 11. After a day of traveling, we just settled in and went to bed. There were five of us in an 8 person hostel room, but we didn't have any other roommates other than the people we came with, so it was nice.

When we woke up on Thursday morning, we walked to a cafe for some breakfast, and then went off to explore Berlin. Most of the public transportation was on strike, but luckily the train running was the one we needed all weekend. We took a train to museum island, and saw the Dom (dome), and the Pergamon and the Bode museums. After that, we walked to the Brandenburg Gate, saw the German Parliament (Reichstag) with this huge glass dome, went to the Holocaust Memorial which was really cool. It was a city block of gray pillar type things that you could walk through. We also went to the museum underneath it. After that we walked to the Berlin wall, which is not really that impressive with what's left of it, but it's still pretty cool. We saw Checkpoint Charlie, and wandered around town for a while. After that, we bought some dinner from a supermarket, and then spent the night relaxing at the hostel.

On Friday we woke up, and went on a tour of a concentration camp called Sachsenhausen just outside of Berlin. It was one of the headquarters of the SS, where SS officers were trained, and a model for many other concentration camps. We saw where the administration offices were, where the prisoners lived, and the types of conditions that they lived in. We saw the roll call area, the barracks, the place where people were hung, and the isolation area.

One of the harder places to see were the showers where people were gassed. They weren't killed in masses there, but the camp was a testing center for other mass murder camps. We saw areas were the prisoners were shot point blank and where they were shot by the firing squad at the execution trench, and the crematorium. We also saw the infirmary, where under the name of medicine and science terrible inhuman experiments were preformed on prisoners. There's a lot of information that I wish I could tell you, but it'd take me the three hours of the tour to relate it all to you. All in all to say that it was rough to hear, but amazing. I'm so glad that I went.

After that, we came back to Berlin and saw the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a church that was bombed in World War II, but a lot of the structure remains and a new church has been built next door.

On Saturday morning we slept in a little bit, and then went to see Charlottenburg Palace, and then took a train to the nearby city of Potsdam, where we walked for what seemed like forever and saw Sanssouci Palace, the New Palace, the other Brandenburg Gate, the Gate of Fortune, and Nicolas Church. I had some Currywurst, a local German/Berlin favorite, and some local gelato. After that we came back to the hostel, and relaxed before making the two hour trek back to the airport.

Our flight got delayed for an hour, but it didn't matter, because even after the two hour flight, we still had to wait for six hours overnight at the airport. See, we decided to take the train there and back, but the guy at the train ticket counter didn't tell us that the last train left an hour before our flight originally got in. So we spent the night in the airport, and then took a train to London Liverpool. However, when we got there, the underground was closed for another hour and a half, so we took a bus to Paddington, where we waited for another hour before taking an hour long train to Oxford and making the half an hour walk home. And finally, we got to sleep.

And so basically I slept for all of today, and ate some pasta, and went to nine at nine.