Yes! Anne can!

As promised, here is my report of my school trip to Berlin!

Unfortunately I didn't eat any Berliners, nor any Curry Wurst. But I did taste a little bit of the atmosphere in Berlin. I knew from stories of my parents that there are a lot of Bears spread through Berlin. These Bears are part of an art project, and they're called Buddy Bären (buddy bears). Each bear is customized and has it's own name. I took it as a mission to personal photograph as many bears as possible. It was kind of hard to really photograph them, because I saw most of the bears while we were driving in the bus. And the bus driver didn't want to stop for some reason. I did, however, photograph three bears.

But well, I will get back to my last post and evaluate my experiences in Berlin. In my last post I mentioned that Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin wall weren't included, but that wasn't true. They were included, all the famous sites of Berlin were included in the Fat Tire bike tour. This was a positive surprise because I wasn't expecting it. I will surely recommend this tour to other people, cycling through the city is a fast and nice way of exploring it.

The concentration camp was a little bit disappointing. Although the history of this camp is horrible, you barely see the remains of it nowadays. It's hard to imagine what happened there when all what's left is one barrack and memorials at an almost empty field. There are also remains of the gas chamber and the ovens, but only foundations. The watch towers at the border line with the forest were the most impressing for me. It was for me more shocking to randomly see gunshot holes in buildings in the city than the visit to the concentration camp. The Underground tour was also quite confronting because the guide confronted you with how life would be in the bunker. Like what to do when there is no air any more, when all lights go out, how to orientate yourself and what happens when there is a nuclear attack. It was more impressing because it was interactive.

At Thursday when we had some time off I visited some sites in Berlin together with Sanne. We went to the Fernsehturm, the Reichtstag and the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus Des Westens). The Fernsehturm is a huge tower with a height of 368 meter. We only went up to 200 meter, but that was high enough for me. The elevator was quite frightening for me because of it's speed, it goes up to 200 meter in 40 seconds! I had to pop my ears all the time. And I also have to admit that I'm actually scared of heights, but I really wanted to see the view from the tower. And it was worth it. When you're up the tower you have an amazing 360 degree view off the city. For the Reichstag we had to wait for half a hour because of the security. We could only access the roof and the dome on top of the roof. The building itself is quite impressing, and the new Dome fits well with the older parts of the building. And because we are girls we also had to visit the most famous department store of Berlin. Especially their delicacy department is quite famous, so we had to try the chocolate over there. And I have to say they were really good.

The 4 star Hotel which we visited was quite interesting. The sales manager who guided us had a lot of interesting things to tell us. Like how he approached customers, and why they were a 4 star hotel and not a 5 star. The Cinema was disappointing however. The things that the guide told us weren't really interesting for me. But this was also because I'm working at a cinema myself and you can almost compare no cinema to the cinema I'm working in.

The night life of Berlin was fun but smaller than I expected. It's of course possible that we visited the wrong pubs and clubs, but it was still small. I think that the average time of sleep we got this week was about 4 hours. So when we finally got home, I slept for 12 hours straight.

Visiting Berlin this week was more fun than I expected. It was also a lot bigger than I imagined it would be. The city is historical but also really modern. It's mixed up between these two. Because of this combination it has a lot to offer for tourists. I can imagine why it's a popular destination for tourists. I certainely want to visit Berlin a second time!