Revival Project

I'm going to work to update this blog over the next couple of weeks by combining my Morocco blog into it, expanding upon the Euro Trip 2012 posts with the rest of the information, digitizing the Galapagos Trip entries from my written journal, and starting a new section for my Euro Trip this past summer through Greece and Croatia.

Stay posted!

Day 7: Visiting a Concentration Camp

This post strikes a more somber note. Firstly, it is our last full day in Berlin. Secondly, it is our last day without Amy. Most importantly, we traveled to a reopened concentration camp and got a feel for the atrocities committed there.

At 9:45, we woke up to head back to the Brandenberg Gate. Sandeman's offers a tour of a concentration camp an hour from Berlin in Oranienberg. The camp was called Sachsenhausen. It is important to note that it was a work camp rather than a death camp, despite the fact that 22,000 people still died there. The next couple of paragraphs will be disheartening, but are still important for me to record. Feel free to skip to after the dashed line further down if you would like to skip over the some of the more upsetting/graphic details.

We had a UK-born guide who walked us around the concentration camp for 3 hours. The camp was constructed in the shape of a equilateral triangle with a watch tower and mounted machine gun set up at the midpoint of the triangle's base, such that they could watch over all of the grounds from that one point. At its max capacity,the camp held 35,000 people with bunk rooms that were meant to hold 100 holding 400. The camp was a work camp and housed lots of political enemies, including the oldest son of Stalin (who died there), many generals and politicians. The prisoners were sent from Berlin by train on the same tracks that we took out of the city, to a spot 20 miles from Berlin. Once there, they were paraded through the town to the main gate beneath the watch tower (called Watchtower A) where the gate was adorned with the infamous motto, "Work sets you free".

While held, prisoners were put into work details. Most worked in the brick-making details, others cooked, cleaned, or carried bodies. The worst work detail was the boot-testing detail where they had to run in a circle all day testing out new boot soles and often holding loads up to 45 pounds above their heads. Life expectancy for these prisoners was 12 days. The camp was also home to a select group of prisoners who worked on a counterfeiting operation for the Nazi's to reproduce the pound and the dollar in order to flood those markets with currency and destroy the markets. Though the pound was successfully reproduced, the dollar never was.

Camp life also had two main features. Firstly, there were two daily roll calls. All prisoners had a half hour to line up in front of watchtowerA and stood there usually for three hours while being beaten and counted. The longest one lasted 15 hours just to torture the prisoners who only had thin cotton uniforms. The second facet of camp life was the beatings. SS soldiers had free reign to attack any prisoner they wanted whenever they wanted. Violence was subjective and encouraged.

The prison housed communists, homosexuals, convicts, and Jews,and each group wore a triangle to represent their affiliation. While sickness and disease accounted for many deaths, executions were a majority of the 22,000 deaths. Over 10,000 soviet prisoners of war were executed in the camp through the use of a "neckshot" device where prisoners were shot in the neck from behind while their height was measured for a "new uniform". A crematorium was built later on site and many bodies were burned. The neckshot and crematorium building was called Station Z, so that the prisoners "came through Watchtower A and left through Station Z." The Nazi party would sell urns filled with ash back to family members outside the camp in order to raise money, even though the ash was made of 25 random people rather than the loved one they believed it contained. There also was a pathology lab where all bodies were taken before cremation.

The camp was burned down when the Nazis were fleeing at the end of the war, so not much from the original camp remained. Some of the original stone buildings still stood, but some of the buildings were also reconstructions for the sake of education. Most buildings were not rebuilt though and their locations were instead marked by an outline of stones on the floor. While there, we visited Watchtower A, two barracks-turned-museums, the kitchen (now a fantastic museum), a memorial, the execution trench, the remains of Station Z, the roll call area, and the pathology lab. The pathology lab was the original building which was creepy because as we walked through it, we followed the journey of the body, first to the operating table to determine the cause of death (often a lie because they couldn't say "beatings by the officers"), then down to the basement to large holding rooms, and then to a ramp to be taken to the crematorium. You could just imagine the smell, the piles of bodies, and blood soaking every surface.

-----------
My concluding thoughts on the experience can be summed up by the following sentences. I was very happy we chose to visit a concentration camp because it really put things in perspective for us. I think it is an important thing to do for anyone who has the chance to do so. Though it was still a sad experience, it was not as hard of an experience as any of us expected it to be. I attribute this to four factors:
1. None of us are Jewish nor a part of any of the other persecuted groups so we lacked that connection or any familial connection to the location
2. Sachsenhausen was a work camp and considered one of the "nicer camps", so the issues associated with a place like Auschwitz, where 1.3 million people perished, were missing.
3. Our guide stated most of the information in a "this is what happened" manner rather than being very depressing about it
4. The lack of ability to truly visualize. Though we could imagine watching the gaunt prisoners standing at roll call and suffering through their every day lives, the emptiness of the camp, our incapability to grasp large numbers (what does 22,000 people look like?), and our lack of experience with any comparable situation to the Holocaust made it impossible to see the camp for what it really was: a death sentence.

The hardest part for me was dealing with the ages of those involved. Two things really drove this home. Firstly, the fact that the average age of the German guard at the camp was only 20.8 years-old. On December 7th, I will be 20.75 years old. I could not imagine beating up and starving people on a daily basis, and being paid to do so, at this point in my life. Secondly, there was an exhibit of the faces of some of the Soviet soldiers before they were executed. It was done as a part of a propaganda program to show that the Slavic races were inferior to the Aryan race. Looking at their head shots which had been blown up to be two feet tall, I mainly noticed how young they were and how sad they looked. I began to be frightened, thinking about how these boys were my age, and I began to imagine an alternate situation where the US was called to war tomorrow, I joined the draft, I was taken in my first battle as a POW, I show up scared and defeated at the concentration camp, and I am shot dead while being lied to about being fit for a new uniform that it turns out I will never see. Just like that a life is snuffed out. Besides making me shudder, it made me feel lucky that I was born in a free country and made me feel fortunate that my childhood was not devastated by a war that killed 46 million people worldwide. It also made me appreciate those in the military who are fighting in the war on terror right now.

To conclude, this was the highlight of our visit to Berlin, in my opinion. If you get the chance to visit one, big or small, please do so. It lead to a lot of really good conversations between the three of us on the train ride back to Berlin. I didn't realize the full extent I was moved by the experience until I got to the site and then I was hit again by another wave when I sat down to write this blog post. Sorry for it being delayed recently. It is a combination of being a bit behind and wanting to take the time to treat this subject matter with the respect it deserves.

I will have another blog post tomorrow about the rest of what we did that day (it will be a short one for once!) and our first day in Prague.

Day 6 Part 2: Gates of Babylon and Pub Crawl

Continuing the previous post about the longest day ever now that I have rested and have more time:

Once the tour was done, we found ourselves standing outside the Berliner Dom. Our natural reaction was to enter the church, pay a couple of Euros, and climb to the top of it. We were able to walk around the base of the dome and take in a 360 degree view of the city. Though it was cloudy, you could still see everything. Afterwards, we visited the royal crypt in the cathedral's basement to see the ornate coffins of dead German kings and emperors.

Our next stop was the Pergamon Museum, Berlin's equivalent to a walk-in ancient history museum. I use the term "walk-in" in the most direct sense of the phrase: the first room contains a reconstructed Greek temple! It was a temple containing a holy altar from the ancient city of Pergamon in Asia Minor (now Turkey) that the museum had dismantled and rebuilt in Berlin. The exhibit has the massive 3-story-tall steps and entryway along with the frieze and altar from the temple's interior and the frieze that ran around the whole outside of the temple. This spectacle however was topped by the room next to it which contained the entrance to a Roman market place, a 4-story-tall structure that is more than 60% intact and must have been 30 yards across. In the room right after that, they had the gates of Babylon! That is, the gates from the real city of Babylon, as in, one of the7 wonders of the ancient world. The gates are made of blue brick, are three stories tall, and still have the cuneiform inscription that says something along the lines of "I am King Nebuchanezzer and I built these gates of Babylon and they are guarded by the Gods." Though one of the two wings of the museum was closed, we still had our minds thoroughly blown.

From here,we ate dinner at a restaurant called the Block House, where Maddie and I each had cheeseburgers. Then it was a quick cab back to the hostel for a 30 minute nap because at 8 pm, we planned to go on a Pub Crawl! For 13 Euros. Sandeman's took us to four pubs and then to one club. The four bars were: Silberfish, a German basement bar; Berlin Central Club, a bar with a large dance floor where you were more encouraged to dance than to drink; CCCP, a crowded Russian-themed bar with a live band; and Belushi's, an American sports bar/hostel. Around 12:30 am, we all boarded a train and headed over to the most bumping part of Berlin, Kreuzberg. This is the Southeastern part of the city where all the big bars/clubs are. They took us to Club Matrix, a club with 7 dance floors, underneath the train station. We explored all of the options but stayed mainly in the top 40/Pop room. Highlights included a urinal in the bathroom that was a painted porcelain recreation of the Rolling Stone mouth, boogieing my pants off, and dancing with Maddie in a cage next to the dance floor. At 2:30 am, we left the club and got to bed at 3 am.

Thus concludes one of the most active days of my life.

Day 6 Part 1: Longest Day Ever - New Europe Tour

Holy crap! Today was one of the longest days of my life! We overslept our alarms because Maddie and I each thought the other was setting one, so neither of us set one! Chris, who didn't bring a single electronic device with him (not even a watch,) was not of much help either haha. We woke up at 9:45 and rushed to get ready. Our plan for the day was to go tithe free New Europe tour from 11 to 2:30 and then to explore from there.

A tour company called Sandeman's has begun to offer these free New Europe tours in almost every city. The way their business model works is that they have these free tours, where the guides are only compensated by tips from us. The company then offers other tours that cost €10-12 each that are more specialized than the free basic city tour, such as a Berlin in World War 2 tour, an Alternative Berlin tour, and even a pub crawl! Because they offer them Niall of the cities we are visiting, we are planning on doing each of the free tours because they help you hit lots of the major sites and help you get your bearings in the city quickly. Our guide, Sophie, did a great job for the free 3.5 hour tour. Because she is only paid on tips, she is encouraged to do a better job.

She took us around to see:
- the Pariseplattz: the plaza behind the Gate where th US embassy is
- the Brandenberg Gate: the last remaining gate of 14 from the time when Berlin was a walled city. It is an ico for the city. It is topped by a statue of a four horse chariot called the quadraga(spelling?) that is so famous that even Napoleon stole it
- the Reichstag: the house of the German Parliament. Has a huge gold dome in the roof that you can take a free tour of
- the Holocaust Memorial: a memorial that looks like a maze of cement rectangular prisms of varying heights
- the Luftwaffte headquarters: one of the few remaining Nazi buildings, the former air force hq has been turned into the German tax department
- the site of Hitlers bunker: though filled in, we stood above the infamous bunker where he shot himself
- a section of the Berlin wall
- Checkpoint Charlie: the American-run checkpoint between East and West Germany
- a big Christmas market
- Humboldt University: where Einstein and Lenin (not John Lennon like Maddie thought) studied
- a Nazi Book Burning Memorial
- the Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny: a cool memorial with an oculus so the elements can cast different effects on the statue it houses
- Museum Island: home to the Royal Armory/National History Museum, the Pergamon museum, the High Arts Museum, the Berliner Dom (a cathedral, "dom" is not a typo), and more

It was well worth it. Along the way two big things happened. Firstly, Chris and I tried currywurst. This delicious concoction costs less than €3. It is a sausage, cut into chunks, smothered with ketchup, and dusted with curry powder. It is usually accompanied by a small warm roll. The currywurst was so good I had to get two! Once we saw this first stand though, we began to see them all over. The second funny thing to happens as that Maddie left us to go get a crepe while we nommed on our curry wurst. She didn't meet up at the rendezvous point until 10 minutes after we had agreed upon. Less than 24 hours in and we thought we had already lost her! She blamed it on the slow people making the creeps but I believe that she had really been secretly scarfing down currywurst from a different vendor!

This is just the first half of our day (up to 3 pm). The rest will come in the next post.

Day 5: I Get More Friends

Today this party loses one man and gains two more. I left Matt in Italy on his way to class when I grabbed the 9:45 Aerobus to BLQ, Bologna's airport. Once there, security was a breeze and I had some time to hang out before my 11:30 flight. When I left Bologna, it was sunny with no clouds in the sky, a big change from the days of rain before. However, when I landed in Berlin, it was at least 10 degrees Celsius colder and raining once again. Was leaving the wrong choice?

A quick cab to the hostel brought me face-to-face with my girlfriend Maddie and my friend Chris! They had flown in at 12:30 and had spent an hour walking around. Our hostel, the Hotel4Youth, is situated on e road, Bernaur Strausse, one of the walls the Berlin Wall ran along. The museum and walking portion began only a block from our hotel, so we dropped our luggage off and walked around the memorial. Because the wall has been mostly dismantled (though some pieces still remain up for posterity's sake), red poles stood where the wall once stood. It was crazy watching a young girl roll her backpack through the poles on her way home from school while imagining that her parents could never have done that even 22 years ago. We walked the whole length of the outdoor exhibit, like 4 or 5 blocks worth, and learned a lot about that divisive time in Berlin's history.

Afterwards, we went to Berlin's Museum of Natural History which was INCREDIBLEEEEE. They have the world's tallest dinosaur, which stands 42 feet tall, and the worlds largest wet collection, over 90,000 jars of dead amphibians, fish, and reptiles. The wet collections were all in a big glass room that looked like the prophesy room from Harry Potter. The museum also had very interesting rooms about dinosaurs, the solar system, minerals, evolution of species, taxidermy, and display making. The collection was enormous and it was well worth the 3 Euros.

Our next stop was dinner. We chose a German restaurant and each ordered a different item: goulash, ribs, and bratwurst. The food was delicious and we had our first beers there too. Afterwards, we continued to explore the city in the rain by walking a couple miles. We started from the restaurant in Oranienberg Tor, walked down to Unter den Linden (the main boulevard), walked over to the Brandenberg Gate and the Reichstag, walked the other way up Unter dee Linden to see Humboldt University, Museum Island, a cathedral, the NationalHistory Museum, and two Christmas markets, and the all the way back to our hostel on Bernaur Strausse. We didn't enter any of the buildings but just admired the way they were lit up. Dead from our long walk, we turned in early for the night by like 10 pm.

Day 4: Bologna Day 2

Matt didn't have class until 1 today so we slept in until 10:30. At this point, we were disheartened to discover that it was still raining. Though we had chosen to sleep through breakfast, we stopped for lunch on the way to Matt's 1 o'clock class. We each had two courses, with a pasta dish first. He then got some bad tripe (we believe it is the intestine if sme animal but since neither of us is a chef or doctor, don't take our word for it) and I ordered what we though would be fried zucchini. It ended up being boiled zucchini and was not any more fun than the tripe. When Matt was in class, I visited a store called Scout, Bologna's answer to Urban Outfitters, and Footlocker. Scout was basically the size of a small KMart but was segmented into small rooms so it seemed like the store never ended. If I had no fiscal restraint, I wouldve dropped infinity euros on the great clothing they sold, but I walked out of both stores empty handed. I did however find and purchase a deck of cards have a picture of Bologna on them from a tabbacheria (general store).

I spent some time hiding from the rain in the library until Matt got out of class. Then the two of us and two of his friends went to a Santa Lucia market in search of Christmas ornaments that said Bologna on them. We struck out. Afterwards, Matt and I went back to the apartment and relaxed. At 7:15, we met two of the girls on his program for dinner at a pizza place that one of the girls had gone to more than 20 times since she had arrived in Bologna! My pepperoni and peppers pizza was delicious. This was followed by a visit to an Irish pub, where happy hour went from 7:30 pm to 10:30, and then to a gelateria called Grom's, which is also in NYC. After a visit to another bar, we went back to our apartment and fell asleep.

Day 3: Spaghetti Bolognese

Today, we started our day at 9:30. The woman offers breakfast to us between 8 and 10 so we each took fast showers and then had some breakfast. Matt had drama class at 11, so we left to walk over there. Though we had walked around the area last night, it was much nicer to be able to see everything with some sun on it.

As I learned today, Bologna is famous for three reasons. Firstly, it is the place where tortellini was created. Secondly, the city contains thousands of porticos. For those who do not study architecture, a portico is a porch supported by arches. All of the porticos are connected in Bologna so all of the sidewaIks are covered and you can walk from place to place without getting wet. Bologna is home to the worldest longest portico, but more about that later. The third reason why it is famous is because of the 300,000 people who live here, 100,000 are college students.

When Matt left for his theater class, I began to wander around the Plaza Maggiore, the city's central square. They had put up a 40 ft Christmas tree in the middle of it today but it was rather ugly undecorated. There is a famous statue of Neptune in the square as well as a huge Basilica and the public library. I walked down some of the side streets and visited a book store. I also stumbled upon an ancient university for physicians, now a library, and an anthropological museum. The museum had a ton of Egyptian items in the basement, including sarcophagi and mummies, plaster casts on the first floor of many famous Greek and roman statues, and on the second floor, tens of thousands of artifacts from Bologna's history between the prehistoric and Gallic eras (when occupied by the Gauls, or Germanic tribes, after the fall of the Roman empire). The highlight for me was a visiting exhibit about the history of counterfeiting currency called Il Vero e Il Falso. It was sponsored by the Italian Guardia di Finanza and covered 2500 years of counterfeiting. They had set up huge displays of currencies with their counterfeit copies right next to them.

Later I met up with Matt after his class and we took a taxi up to the monastery of San Luca that looks over the city. The bad news was that it was raining, the monastery was closed, and so was the pizza restaurant at the top. The good news was that we walked down from there in the worlds longest Portico. It measures over 2 miles and has 666 arches. We had a delicious lunch at a restaurant near arch 44. Afterwards we visited the basilica. It was massive. We walked around Bologna for a bit in the rain and visited a place called San Sebastien (maybe?) that had seven churches all crammed together and connected to one another. After we went back to the apartment to rest.

For dinner, we walked back to the center of town and met two of Matt's friends for apertivi and dinner. Apertivi is this cool thing Italians do where you pay for one drink (like 6 Euros) and then you pay a Euro or two more for access to a buffet of appetizers. The place we went had at least 9 different dishes including couscous, two pastas, and some salads. You hang out for an hour and then go get dinner. We went to a different restaurant for dinner where I had some tasty lasagna and we drank some wine. After an hour and a half of dinner, we traversed the city for good gelato and then traversed the city again to go to a bar. Although the city was kind of dead (it was Tuesday) it was fun to be in the bar. All the places we went to tonight were playing a channel called mydeejay which was incredible because it was a commercial-free music video station that seemed to only play good music. Afterwards, we went home and got in bed by 11:30.