Frescos & Roses

The one room that had been reconstructed to look like it had been was the Jewish room. 

The wash basins...

The Jewish Memorial at the concentration camp. It was situated where the cremating happened. 

Roses were left on one of the exhibit window ledges. 

These were original frescos in the kitchen that prisoners painted. 

Concentration Camp

The next day we took an hour bus drive out of Berlin to go to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This camp was not majorly used for housing for Jews, but instead was used to house political prisoners and other enemies of Germany. There are no longer any of the 'baracks' where the prisoners would've slept, instead there are beds of stones in the position of where they would've been. 

Arbeit Macht Frei - Work makes you Free

Checkpoint Charlie

The famous Checkpoint Charlie...

The museum at the place wasn't all that good, too much writing and not about what we've studied yet, but it was fun walking around with Zoe. 

The Berlin Wall (II)

And here's some more panels from the East Side Gallery....

AWESOME PHOTO! 

This wall was really cool. It was a bunch of handprints. Someone had drawn their hand and and written  'Emilie' which is the same way that you spell my friend's name. Okay, as scary as that was, the date was the same as the day we were there - Friday 30th, 2012. AND, it was spelt in Danish, which is where Emilie is from. So, basically, someone called the same as my friend and from the same country, came on the same day we were there and wrote their name...pretty freaky!

Group Photo!

The Berlin Wall

Our next stop was about halfway down the remaining Berlin wall, which is 1.3km long and covered in about 106 paintings from different artists all to do with peace and freedom. Here are a few of the paintings that I liked...

The paintings were all on the East Side of the wall, hence the name East Side Gallery.

The Holocaust Memorial

We had briefly stopped the night before to see the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe from the edge, but it was nothing compared to walking around inside of it. Before we were allowed to explore the memorial, we visited another exhibition which was so incredibly sad that I was crying from about the second room (oddly, I was the only one). 

The memorial is made up of 2,711 concrete boxes varying in height. Some of them were massive. It felt as though I was trapped and at some times I even felt claustrophobic, which is I guess the intended effect.

For more information about the memorial click here.

The Story of Berlin

Our first stop was at The Story of Berlin Exhibit, which was interesting although to actually get much out of it a LOT of reading was involved. Not sure what the significance of this piano is, but I liked the photo, so I decided to put it on the blog...

For more information go to: www.story-of-berlin.de

Bus Tour round Berlin

I'm not sure what I was expecting we'd do during the day, but I can tell you that I did not expect that we'd travel around in a bus for half the day...

We had a very good guide, but it's still not the same as being outside the whole day, not that the weather was particularly nice, but still. Here are two photos that I got from the bus. 

The Hotel Transit

Here's two pictures of the place where we ate breakfast and dinner. 

The first night the dessert looked like salad dressing and we all looked at it like, "WHAT is that!?" Finally, I couldn't stand it any longer and I went up and took some into a bowl. Thank goodness it wasn't salad dressing, it was custard. :)

Hotel/Hostel (??) Room

I was sharing a room with 4 of my friends; Ellie, Fiona, Emilie and Amelia. The Hotel 'Transit' was in between a hotel and a hostel. The beds were made when we went there = hotel. A housekeeper came each day to tidy up = hotel. Kind of in the middle of nowhere = hostel. Majority of the people staying there were kids/school groups = hostel. You get the point...

We were really lucky because our room looked out to Berlin instead of into a courtyard where everyone else faced. 

Ellie and Amelia

Berlin at Night

Here's some photos of our walk around Berlin at night: 

The Reichstag building (German parliament) from afar...
Random point of useless info: In 1933 a Dutch communist set fire to the Reichstag Building and Hitler used it to say that communists were EVIL and VIOLENT

The facade of the Reichstag building... 

The Brandenburg Gate - the Berlin wall used to run just in front of it....
This is a Wikipedia link if you wanna know more...

Berlin Trip

Waking up at 6 in the morning is not fun, but waking up at 6 in the morning and then spending 12 hours on a school bus is even worse. Thursday the 29th of March was spent on the bus to Berlin. We passed the time watching movies and playing cards.
The Berlin trip was a History trip to do with Hitler's rise to power, which we had been studying the past year in History. 

From L-R = Amelia, Fiona, Emilie, Zoe

When we finally arrived in Berlin we stopped at our hotel and ditched our stuff, had dinner and then went to catch the metro to the center of Berlin to see the center lit up at night. 

From L-R = Emile, Fiona, Amelia, Ellie, Ines, Saskia