Are you locals?

Berlin is much prettier than I expected.

We started off the day with a 3 hour guided bus tour of the city. I am quite proud of myself for how many pictures I took throughout the day. They gave us the option to get off the bus downtown on our way back to the hotel, so we took that chance to get off and go shopping and grab lunch. We found this super cute German version of Forever 21 and it took everything I had not to buy this very cute dress that I didn’t need. Buying anything here throws us all off a bit. In euro’s, nothing seems all that expensive. It’s when we remember that we have to add half the price to get what it actually is in American dollars, and that is when everything starts to look very overpriced. Moral of the story- I didn’t buy the dress.

One thing I wanted to do while I was in Berlin was to eat a bratwurst. My two summers working at the German-American food stand at the Olympia Farmers Market has made me curious as to how different bratwurst, currywurst, and the other sausages we sold are in comparison to the authentic thing. Lucky for me everyone else had the same idea, and we managed to wander directly into the town square where each way you turned was a different authentic German food stand. I got a currywurst because well, 1. I asked for a bratwurst but none were ready so she offered me a currywurst instead and 2. At the last minute I also remembered that in Germany the sausage used in a currywurst is actually the sausage we refer to as bratwurst. It was so much better than anything I ever sold at the stand at the market. I’m not saying I will eat bratwurst more often now, but I do admit that I may have it a few more times if it comes from Germany.

This afternoon was free, but the school had 3 optional tours that we could choose from if we wanted to do something other than wander randomly around the city. I decided to go to the Jewish Museum with Allie, Gabby, Jessie, Caleb and Vince. The boys were nice enough to bail on us once we were there for 5 minutes, so we didn’t have to hear their complaints the entire time. In my opinion, the New York Jewish Museum is better. I enjoyed going today and looking around, but my main interest is the Holocaust and World War 2 and the amount of the museum dedicated to that part of Jewish history was sadly lacking. They did have a very interesting Holocaust Tower, which wasn’t a tower at all. Instead, it was a cement room where you could still hear the outside world but only a little sunlight was coming through one corner of the ceiling. We spent five minutes sitting on the floor just staring up at the 30 foot ceiling. It was eerie and disturbing, but a little bit eye opening. The entire museum was architecturally significant. The building was in the shape of a lightning bolt and everything was tilted or off center. It was made by a Jewish-American architect from New York. He wanted to design the building so that the architecture itself was just as much of a moving experience as the pieces of history inside of it.

We took the metro back to the west side of the city and grabbed some apples and wine at the local market for an afternoon snack in the park. Not even thinking about it, we got to the park and realized we had no way of opening the bottle of wine. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. For dinner, we decided to walk around and eat wherever we thought looked good. Down this one block was a very small, beautiful Spanish restaurant. We took a seat on the sidewalk next to a group of locals and had a delicious dinner of tapas. On the way to the restaurant, a couple with luggage in tow and who looked very lost, asked us in pretty good English if we were locals. We told them that we were Americans and probably wouldn’t be of much help. It’s nice to know that when we don’t speak and are walking with confidence in some direction we can pass as somewhat European. Hopefully we can keep this up; maybe once we’ve learned some Italian we will be able to pass as locals? I doubt it, but we can try. 

Tuesday, September 6th