Berlin, Germany

My mom left early friday March 11th.... as for me? I left for Berlin at 6:30 AM, luckily I was able to pass out during the 4.5 hour bus ride from Prague to Berlin. We arrived in Berlin around 12... and we had until 2pm the next day to try to see everything... clearly an impossible task! Lucie and Daniela, who run our ISA program, took us on a walking tour of the city and then after that we had free time until it was time to head back to Prague the next day.

TV Tower

Berlin was a really great city, much different than Prague... Berlin was DESTROYED after the war, while Prague was UNTOUCHED and so the buildings etc were obviously not from centuries ago like they are in Prague.

Everyone has heard of the Berlin wall and it was really amazing to be able to see it in real life. A wall that separated an entire city... insane.

"Why"

"Save our planet"

"Wake up, Fight Back"

There are also pieces of the wall all over the city. The Western side of the wall was covered with grafitti and a lot of art... but the eastern side was not allowed to be touched by the citizens... going anywhere near the wall could result in them getting shot.

There is also a line throughout the city to show where the wall once was.

We also visited Checkpoint Charlie, which was the most famous crossing point between the East and West sides of the Berlin Wall.

We took a little break from the really intense history and visited Fassbender and Rausch, a world famous chocolate store! They had chocolate versions of all the famous monuments and buildings in the city, plus the chocolate was delicious!

With only a few hours left before heading home, four of us decided to venture outside of the city... head into the suburbs to see the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst

... here was the historic site of the surrender of the German Armed Forces on 8 May 1945, we got to go in the room where they surrendered, which was really cool

Berlin was really fun and we wish we got more time there because I really wanted to visit the Holocaust Memorial there, its all different blocks of varying heights and sizes covering an entire street block and you can walk through them and it seemed really cool! but we just didn't have enough time :( maybe next time!