More Loft

My favourite part of the Loft Performance was this one guy who juggled and did the diablo. He was AMAZING. He did 5 diablos at one time. 

That night we went back to the hotel and were allowed to stay up for a bit later than usual. The next day we were off back to Holland. 

And the day after that I was off to Morocco with my family at a very ridiculous flight time...

Loft - The Seven Fingers

The final night we went to a show called LOFT. It was a mixture of humor (in German and English) as well as acrobatics, juggling and diablo-ing. 

Click here to go to their website. 

The funniest part about it was how to enter the auditorium. We (Zoe and I) went up these stairs and there were this German couple with us. The first door that we came upon led onto the stage. Thinking it was a joke we continued up, only to find a dead end. So, we went back to the stage door and went through. We ducked through a fridge and ended up on the stage. The actors pointed to our seats, and we went and joined our friends. About ten minutes into the show, a doorbell rang, the actors stopped their show and opened the fridge, to reveal a family come to watch the show. They offered them pretzels and it was all really pretty funny. 

The fridge that we used to enter the stage

Potsdam

After having a tour at this tudor looking building (where the big three met to discuss what was going to happen to Germany after WW2) we got to have a walk around the shopping area of Potsdam. We got nice ice cream and had a good time walking around. 

Sanssouci

And then we were back on the bus to a city called Potsdam about an hour away from Berlin. The first stop we made was at a nice garden with this palace called Sanssouci which means 'carefree' in French. The memorial below was where a famous person was buried with his 12 dogs. The people place potatoes on the grave to remember how the person took them out of hunger by telling them to plant potatoes. The photo in the top left shows the palace with it's terraced gardens in the summer and the one in the right shows what we saw when the plants weren't in bloom...

Zoe and Emilie

The Dome

 At the top of the Reichstag Building is a big glass dome with stairs running around the edge to the top. It is a great place to see Berlin from, although photos from the top weren't all that great cause of reflections off the glass. 

We managed to get ourselves positioned so that we were reflected in the massive mirror funnel in the middle of the dome. The mirrors are used to light up the room underneath the dome where conferences are held. 

The Reichstag Building

The next day we had to get up real early to get to the Reichstag Building in time for our entry. 

Bowling in Berlin

Our evening activity on Saturday night was Bowling, the first actually fun thing! (The night before we went to another bunker, it was interesting, but boy my feet were hurting by the end) 

We played two games of bowling and I came second in the second game. It was really fun, a good evening to a kind of down day. 

Outside of the Bowling Alley was a tall tower. This is a cool photo of it... 

SHOE STAR! :)

From L-R: Amelia, Zoe, Emilie, Ellie, Fiona, Me

Shopping!

As many of you should know, I LOVE to shop.....

um....

if you thought that then it turns out you don't really know me as well as you think you do. 

:)

Anyway, after the bus ride back (passing the Olympic Stadium) we got dropped off at Potsdamer Platz, in a massive three floor shopping mall. We had to stay in groups of at least three, but the others in my room wanted to shop, and Zoe and I didn't really have much intrest of looking in overpriced clothing stores, so we bent the rules a bit and went off by ourselves. Turns out that we bought more than our friends who wasted their times looking at things they couldn't properly afford! 

I bought Ashlynn a t-shirt and got some chocolate for mommy and daddy. 

Cool Fountain

We went to Starbucks to get hot chocolates - YUM!

Berlin Stop Lights

Berlin has unique pedestrian stop lights. They were started in East Berlin while the wall was up, but the tradition continued and these lights can now be seen all over the city. They are very unique to Berlin and candy, bags, and clothing as well as other merchandise can be bought with these designs on:

STOP

GO

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.