School trip to Berlin

On Friday, October 24th, our group left for our school excursion to Berlin. The trip was included in our program and we were excited that we did not have to buy train tickets or book a hostel because our program did it for us. The train was leaving at 8:30am and it took about five hours to get there. When we arrived around 1:30 we all waited around (all 40 or so of us) for our professor to get our metro passes and then we moved on to the hostel and checked into our rooms. I was staying a room with nine other girls for the three nights we were to be there. After checking in, we had the whole afternoon to do what we wanted so I walked around the city some with some of the other girls and we came upon the Brandenburg Gate, one of the most famous symbols of Berlin. It used to be the gate to the city and is right next to where the Berlin wall used to separate East and West Berlin. We ate dinner at a German restaurant and had Bit Burger beer. After dinner we headed back to the hostel where we were meeting other people in our group and we hung out the rest of the night and went out to a bar.

The next morning we were meeting as a group with our professor at the Pergamon Museum. The museum was really interesting and had actual pieces of ancient Roman and Greek temples. There was one really large section of the entrance to a Greek temple called the Pergamon Altar in the main room when you walked in the museum. This was the first museum I had been to that had pieces of temples that were so big. After the Pergamon Museum we went to find some lunch and there was a large market set up right next to the museum. They had some food stands and stands selling books, jewelry, and other flea market type things. There was also a hat stand where about five us bought new hats and the German man working at the stand was really excited about helping us pick them out and fitting them. We had to meet in front of the museum again at 1:30 and then we went a walk with our professor to a few spots to stop and sketch. The first stop was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which was a large open room with a statue in the middle and circle skylight in the ceiling right over it. I really liked this spot because from the outside I would never have guessed what the monument looked like on the inside. Our professor Paul gave us about 30 minutes to sketch whatever we wanted around the tomb and then we met outside again and everyone laid out their sketchbooks and we all looked through them and Paul made some comments about what he saw. On the way to our next stop we passed through the Brandenburg Gate again and then walked to the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This monument took up an entire city block and was a series of thousands of concrete blocks in varying heights on an undulating floor that you can walk through. Underneath the monument there was a museum that explained how the Jews were persecuted throughout the Second World War.

After waking though the museum and spending some time going through the monument, I walked around with some other students to see some of the other interesting buildings in Berlin. On our way we passed some actual sections of the Berlin Wall that were still in place. From here we walked down a long street where we passed several interesting buildings as well as several of the embassies for other countries. We were looking for the Nordic Embassy, designed by the architecture firm Snohetta that we easily spotted because it is covered in hundreds of movable teal louvers. It was cool to walk around the embassy to see the different materials, steel, wood, and glass, and it started getting dark and different colored lights were shining on the louvers. From here we took the double decker public transportation bus, we sat on the top level of course, back towards the hostel and then we had dinner at a Mexican place that John had spotted. The food was good and that night we hung out at the hostel again and then went out.

Sunday morning we met again as a group at the Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. I thought the museum would focus more on the Holocaust but the exhibits focused on the history of the Jewish people leading up to their persecution in World War II. The building that housed the museum was really interesting to walk through and had a very irregular gallery arrangement and a jagged plan. The lines that created the pattern on the outside and the window openings on the inside were created by drawing lines across the city to connect the houses of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust. After walking through the museum we again met with our professor to go on a sketching walk. We walked through several Architecture Blocks, entire blocks that were destroyed and then the whole block was commissioned to a specific architect. We saw the blocks designed by Aldo Rossi, Philip Johnson, and Peter Eisenman.

After the sketching walk we had the rest of the afternoon free to see what we wanted. The block designed by Eisenman was right next to the famous checkpoint along the wall separating the American (West) and Soviet (East) sectors of Berlin called Checkpoint Charlie. This is where people were allowed to pass through the sectors and the wall if they had the appropriate documentation. There was also a display here about the wall and markers on the street where the wall used to be. I looked around here for a while before heading over to the Bauhaus Archiv. On the way we stopped at the National Gallery designed by Mies van der Rohe (the same architect who designed the Barcelona Pavilion we had seen earlier on the trip in Barcelona). This building is a gallery that is essentially a glass rectangle supported by steel and just like the Barcelona Pavilion, very simple and clean. The exhibit inside was being changed so we could not get in but it was still nice to see it. We jumped on a bus again and arrived at the Bauhaus Archiv. The Bauhaus is a design school that opened up in Germany in 1919 and it is the school that the NC State College of Design is based on. The school changed locations two times before finally being closed down by the Nazis in 1933. The galleries were really interesting and it was cool to see some examples of work that was similar to things we have done in studios at NC State. They also had a really great gift shop where I bought an Aalto Vase, an organic shaped vase designed by the architect Alvar Aalto, which I have wanted for a long time.

After the Bauhaus museum we walked around the city a little bit more and then headed to the Reichstag, the German Parliament building where we planned to head to the top and see the glass dome that was added by the architect Norman Foster. When we arrived the line was really long and we found out that the dome was closed for repairs and you couldn't go inside of it. Since it was already dark and the view from the top of the building wouldn't be so great either, we decided to put going to the top off until tomorrow and we went to find a place to eat. After taking the metro and walking by several restaurants we came to one with outdoor seating, heaters, and big hamburgers with fries so we took a seat. Dinner was good and after wards we headed back to the hostel. We all hung around in the room and I fell asleep. At midnight John came and woke me up and gave me my birthday presents since it technically was my birthday at midnight. He gave me a really nice coat that I had seen in a vintage store a few weeks before and pointed out. He also gave me knitting needles and some blue yarn since I had expressed wanting to learn how to knit when a lot of the other girls in architecture started knitting themselves scarves.

The next day, Monday, October 27th, we had the whole day to ourselves before we had to be on train back to Prague at 4:45. I walked around with John all day and it was rainy but there were still a few things we wanted to see. We went back to the Reichstag and waited in line for almost an hour to go up and see the dome. We could not get inside the dome, which had a walkway circling up the whole inside to the top and a really large screen inside to give some protection from the sun, but we were able to walk around the outside and we had good views of Berlin from the roof. After spending some time at the top, John and I came down and headed over to the DZ Bank by the Brandenburg Gate. The bank was designed by Frank Gehry and we could get inside and into the lobby where we could see the giant metal, glass, and wood sculpture that filled the atrium.

From the bank we walked around to find a place to eat. We had lunch at a German place where John had bratwurst with curry and I had a schnitzel sandwich. After lunch we headed over to the Sony Center, a large building complex that has stores, offices, restaurants, and a movie theater that all face a really large atrium in the center. By then it was starting to get late and we had to head back to the train station. We picked up our bags that we had dropped off in lockers and played cards for a little while before meeting the rest of our group at the train platform to go back to Prague. Berlin was a really great city and there were really a lot of things to do and see there. It was also nice to spend my birthday there walking around the city with John.