After a long, exciting, challenging, wonderful week of travel around Germany, I'm finally back "home" in Reutlingen. It's funny, being away this week made me actually start referring to Reutlingen as my home, and while I had a blast exploring other cities, it is good to be back. In total, we had 10 travel days for this trip. For the first five, the whole group got to see just about everything there is to see in Berlin with our professor as tour guide. After that, we got to split up into smaller groups to travel wherever we wanted, which for me, meant Cologne. I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to include everything we did into one post, but I'll try my best to summarize the highlights.
Since we arrived in Berlin relatively late on Friday night, I think of Saturday as our first official day there. That day, we started off on a rather somber note with a tour of Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp. I had never been to a concentration camp before, but I had heard that it was an intense experience. It was actually very different from what I was expecting. I had thought that most of the camp would be left in its original state, but to my surprise, much of it had been renovated to make it feel more like a museum. Still, I found that the as-is parts of it had the greatest emotional impact on me. It's hard to describe the feeling you get when you're standing on the same ground where thousands of people suffered so greatly, not all that long ago.
Sunday was our first real chance to explore the city. Since I've been to Berlin once before, our city tour was an opportunity for me to get reacquainted with the place I had come to love. I tried to contain my excitement as we passed all my favorite landmarks, but throughout the week, I made it my mission to go to several places I visited on my first trip and take similar photos of them, sort of like a then-and-now comparison. Of course, the logical place to start was the Brandenburg Gate.
Included in our trip, we each received a three-day museum pass that was valid at 50 museums throughout the city. After a few group tours of the big ones, we had 2 days to split pup and go to the ones of our choice. After we were all museumed out, there was one thing I had left to do. Last time I was in Berlin, I went to a specie section of the Berlin Wall that was still up and had murals painted on different sections, many of which are wildly colorful. I had no idea where this place was anymore or what it was called, but I had to find it again. After over an hour of leading 2 friends to the forgotten corners of East Berlin, I found it and once again, took a picture of my favorite mural.
After Berlin, we were on our own. It was a little intimidating to go traveling for the first time without the whole group, but as it turned out, our 2 free days in Berlin served as great practice in how to navigate a foreign city by ourselves. In fact, we never really got lost, and being smaller, Cologne is a little easier to handle than Berlin. We saw all the big attractions there, the cathedral, the Rhine, and a few museums. We found some good restaurants, lived the hostel life, which actually isn't as terrifying as I expected, and made it back safe and sound.
Now we have one more week of classes, before we're off to Lutherland and beyond on Friday. Because that's a long way away, I'll try to have a new post in the meantime, so be on the lookout for that soon!
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