Study Abroad - Berlin, Germany

01-17-09 (Saturday)

This morning I took my time getting ready. It’s Saturday so there was no class to worry about. CH and I are staying until tomorrow morning, while most of the students are leaving today. I know of one other group of part-time MBAs who are renting a car and driving to Poland to see the Auchwitz memorial. CH and I are not so adventurous to rent a car and drive 5 hours to Poland, but we did visit the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

The Holocaust Memorial was nothing short of sobering. There are four main rooms in the memorial, each one more heart wrenching than the last. Perhaps the hardest exhibit to deal with contained excerpts taken from diaries or letters of victims of the Holocaust just days before they were killed in one of the Nazi concentration camps (I have included a picture below of this exhibit). The memorial, although very hard to deal with, is worth seeing if you have the opportunity to visit Berlin.















After visiting the Holocaust Memorial, CH and I had some lunch and decided to explore the area a bit. The Holocaust Memorial is near the Brandenburg Gate and the nearest U-bahn (subway) station is Unter Den Linden. Unter Den Linden is also a major street in Berlin and leads up to the Brandenburg Gate. While walking around we noticed a very strong police presence and they seemed to be preparing for an event of some sort. There were barricades being set up and streets closed off; something big was in the works but we had no idea what. So we walked around for another 20 minutes or so and finally decided to ask someone what was going on. The person told us that it looked to him like a protest of some sort. No more than a minute later the first of about 2,000 Palestinians began marching by us in protest of the Israeli attacks in Gaza (rather ironic considering that we spent the first part of the afternoon at the Holocaust memorial).

Considering that Israel and America were the objects of the protest I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. CH and I were probably the only Americans on the block and while I could probably pass for a German, it didn’t ease my tension much. The demonstration, however, turned out to be fairly peaceful.



After leaving leaving the area where the protest took place, we headed back to the hotel for some rest. Later we got dinner at a traditional German restaurant called Schildkrote (where the waitress drank more beer than we did) and on the way home were harassed by a sketchy Russian at an intersection trying to convince us to visit the cabaret down the street. All in all, it was a pretty eventful day.