Good Timing

After the last two days, my mind was exhausted. I slept in for as long as possible and finally faced the day close to noon. Germany has so much important history that unfortunately it's impossible to cover all of the depressing things in just two days.

Our first stop today was to the information center underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I didn't learn very much new information here, but I thought the information center was extremely well done. It had six rooms. The first covered general history. The second room was the most challenging for me. It was actual artifacts that had been found in camps or thrown off trains, mostly postcards. They were heart wrenching, and I think all of the people that wrote them were murdered. Reading their thoughts, in their script, mere moments or days before they were killed was extremely tough. The third room highlighted 10 to 15 families and described who each person was, what they did, where they lived, and what happened to them in a portrait style fashion. The fourth room had brief biographies of people that were murdered. The statistic there was that if they read all of these biographies that were approximately the same length (maybe a minute or two) it would take over 6 years to go through them all. The fifth room was set up with video reels, pictures, and audio stations where you could listen to survivor stories. They were all awful, of course. One story was of a woman who survived a mass shooting by jumping into a mass grave full of corpses right before the gun fire and then felt fresh corpses fall on top of her. She had to push them off of her so that she wouldn't literally be buried alive. Somehow she got out of that... Another person described the selection process and asked for her mother to be able to stay with her kids. The Nazis happily obliged; what the poor woman didn't know was that children and the elderly were being sent straight to the gas chambers. She's lived with that guilt for the rest of her life. The last room was set up with stations connected to the Jewish foundation that tracks as many of the deaths of Jews in WWII as possible and you can search by name for people in this huge database. Overall, not a "fun" experience but it is so important to learn about these things so that I can tell other people. The more people that try to understand this catastrophe the better.

After that, we used our awesome timing to go to some museums (a rarity for us). Turns out that on Thursdays lots of museums are free here. We arrived at a modern art museum that was free between 2 and 6 PM around 330, but the modern art was stupid and worthless to me, except for the Warhol stuff which I liked a lot. Seriously, filling up a tunnel with animal lard and cutting it into 6 pieces and putting them all in a room is NOT art. Also, putting a lemon next to a yellow light bulb? ALSO, NOT ART.

Then we went to the Pergamon Museum (we've gotten multiple recommendations to go see it). We arrived at 5 but found out it had free admission after 6! We thought the Pergamon Museum was an exception to the free museum Thursday rule because it is so cool, so that was a bonus that we didn't have to pay for it. Well, we went to Alexanderplatz for an hour and got ice cream, and then came back at 6 when it was free. But, we were sneaky, and put our bags in a locker when we got there the first time at 5! Hah! One hour less of carrying stuff around! We are so clever...though taking our locker key off museum property felt a little like stealing, though it was genuinely just slightly prolonged borrowing.

The Pergamon Museum was cool but the only things that I understood the significance of (after googling both things, because I don't remember learning about these things in real life) were the reconstruction of the Pergamon Alter and the Ishtar Gates of Babylon. Both were really impressive. Everything else was pretty and probably famous I just had no idea what I was looking at. Ignorance is kind of a bummer. Also, when we arrived at the museum at 6 I saw Ashley (half of our new Canadian couple friends) in the window next to Andy! Random! We wandered around the museum with them until about 7 when Laura and I decided to head out to go change and eat before meeting up with Nicole later that night.

Dinner was, of course, another 2 euro gyro. SO GOOD. Seriously.

We met Nicole (the girl I met on our Prague free city tour) at a U-Bahn station close to a bar she suggested we go to. The bar was called Madam Claude and Thursday has 2 for 1 beer nights. And a beer is 3 euros. It was glorious. After being there a short while, a ton of Nicole's other university friends joined us that are also studying here in Berlin! It is always so nice to hang out with new people our own age. The night was really fun but before we knew it, midnight had arrived. The last metros stop running at about 12:30 AM and we were a couple of transfers away from home, so we finally made it out shortly thereafter. However...it was not soon enough, and we had a miserable time taking the public transportation home! When we got to our first transfer point, the second subway we needed had already stopped running for the night, so we had to go back to where we came from and wait for a metro that hadn't stopped running yet. Ugh.

Of course we made it home though and set in for another night of much needed sleep. It feels like we've been going non stop.


Quotes:
Nicole: "Que Pasa (a bar) has really great cocktails for cheap; they pour really strong."
Steph: "Yeah but if I can taste the alcohol then it's not a good cocktail."
Nicole: "Oh, I like the taste of whiskey....sours."
Hahaha

Accomplishment:
Had perfect timing to go to two free museums that normally would have cost 5 euros each! Booya!

Travel Tip:
When people tell you that the last U-Bahns leave at 12:30, believe them, and plan accordingly.