I bought enough chocolate alone to feed a small army. Maybe that should have been a clue that I didn’t need so much stuff. There will be a very happy element at the Air Force Academy next weekend, I think.

I wasn’t able to meet up with my friend this afternoon to get some pictures that actually have me in them (remind me to get a cell phone next time I leave the country), but I still managed to get the occasional passer-by to do it for me. Listening for other English-speaking people really helps things out. I now have proof that I haven’t just been hiding in a hole somewhere and making this all up.

See?

I also headed over to Checkpoint Charlie, and got the picture of the sign that I missed the last time I was there.

There are more pictures on Flickr, although I admit I didn’t reach my 1,000 picture target. Looks like I feel 129 pictures short. Maybe I should go to the zoo again.

This picture has an interesting story. Or sad, I supposed, depending.

The woman in turquoise hangs around tourist attractions, asking “Speak English?” If you say yes, she pushes that card in front of your face, which asks for money. I saw her at the Topography of Terror, Checkpoint Charlie, and the S-Bahn station at Alexanderplatz at least 3 times. She keeps at least one child with her, and one time it was actually an older child who was asking tourists if they speak English. What I find interesting is that she seems to be very well-cared for, and the little girl even more so, even though she spends her whole day begging tourists for spare change. I feel bad for the little girl, really.

On a different note, I still have to figure out how I’m going to fit the rest of this stuff in my bag, so I’m going to make an effort to do that. Oh, and dinner’s ready, so I’m going to eat. Sounds like a plan.

Let’s take a minute to think about this.

This is my room. This is exactly how my room looks right now, except that I’m sitting at the desk typing, not in the corner taking a picture.

All that stuff on the floor has been expanding for four weeks. No, I’m serious. It didn’t take up as much space two weeks ago, or even last week. It’s growing. This could be due in small part to the fact that I keep buying things, as evidenced by the big shopping bag on the floor. It could also be due to the fact that all those clothes that are on the floor were, at one time, in the armoire that you can’t see in this picture. It’s just out of range on the left-hand side. Anyway, this room is a disaster. All that stuff has to fit back into the big yellow duffle bag underneath it.

Speaking of yellow, yes, my room is yellow. It is very yellow. And the ceiling is green. I’m not kidding. It hasn’t bothered me as much as you’d think living in a yellow room would bother me, considering I really don’t like yellow. It’s probably just because I’m never there, and when I am, I’m staring at the computer screen or sleeping. It does get pretty bright in the morning though.

The reason I said I should start packing tonight is simply because I don’t think I’ll have time later. I’m planning to go out tomorrow afternoon and have someone take pictures of me (rather than just me taking them all). Then tomorrow night, I don’t have any firm plans, but I’m pretty sure that whatever I want to do won’t involve packing.

On second though, maybe it will. I’m weird like that.

Saturday morning, my flight leaves at 11, so I want to be at the airport at 9, which means we have to leave here at 8:30. Anyone who thinks I’ll be interested in getting up nice and early Saturday morning to do said packing either doesn’t know me at all, or has lost his or her mind.

So, what am I doing, while I’m not packing?

Oh yeah.

I took a good 30 or so pictures from the top of the tower, and another 5 or so of the tower itself. A majority of the pictures taken from the top are of the Brandenburg Gate. I didn’t realize I had so many of these until I was going through them all a few minutes ago. I took out a few bad ones and made some quick edits to the good ones, and am uploading the final products now.

First, this photo was actually taken from the lower viewing level of the Siegessäule. This level only requires walking up two flights of narrow, spiral stairs, not 16. Disclaimer: I didn’t count, so I don’t know if that number is accurate.

I like what the colors did in this picture. I don’t know what that is, but I like it.

One of the many photos taken of the Brandenburg Gate and communication tower in Alexanderplatz, from the top of the tower.

This is the Siegessäule itself.

After the tower, I decided to head over to the Pergamon Museum. Its focus is ancient history. I’ve been told it’s very interesting, and definitely a must-see, and it’s free on Thursday nights after 6 pm. When I got there, a very important equation quickly formed in my head: free admission + a new, highly advertised exhibit = there’s no way I’m standing in that line.

It stretches along the bank of the river, across the bridge, and into the museum. And it wasn’t moving very quickly. I gave up. I’m tired anyway, and should probably start thinking about cleaning up the disaster that I’m calling my room in preparation to begin packing. Oh, I should probably start packing too, since I don’t know what I’m going tomorrow night, although I think it will include a few alcoholic beverages.

In reality, I’m probably looking at either one glass of wine or two beers. One beer doesn’t seem to do anything to me. I seem to be developing a taste for it though. That must be inherited, along with my love for riding trains, trams, and cable cars, and my constant desire to take pictures of things.

I’m turning into my dad.

I have 805 photos in the Germany section right now. I’m curious to see if I hit 1,000 by the time I leave on Saturday. I’m also really thankful they’re digital, and not film. I’d be pushing 34 rolls of film already. That would cost about $170 to get processed at Target. Wow.

At some point I should go through all those pictures and find the best ones. There’s something I could do during the 12 or so hours I’ll spend flying on Saturday.

A few tips, before I link to some photos:At the East Side Gallery, the drawings were better on the end of the wall that I started on. Because my uploader brings them in from most to least recent, this means that the further you get into my pictures, the better they will get. The last of the East Side Gallery pictures will be the best. (Except that they’re all covered with graffiti anyway.)

The tram pictures come after the U- and S-Bahn pictures, and some of those are pretty good.

The Musical Instrument Museum pictures are right in the middle, and if you don’t care about old instruments, you can skip them. That probably will include everyone but me, and that’s ok. I’ll have to send some music students some of those pictures, so I can get proper appreciation. I have some TAs and professors in mind as well.

If the sunset pictures look blurry, it’s probably because they are. It was very dark, so the shutter had to stay open a long time to get the photo.

All right, now for some pictures.

First, a tram picture, dedicated to my dad.

My tram hunting was successful. Following their tracks helps, and so does finding places where they congregate. I even have some pictures with more than one tram at a time.

Next, one of the images at the East Side Gallery (leftovers of the Berlin Wall).

I know, it’s covered in graffiti, but the important part is the picture of the car crashing through the Wall, and the words above it – “Test the Best”. Apparently brute force using cars only worked until the Soviets realized it was working, and rebuilt the Wall to withstand the impact of a car. I wonder if it really is the best wall ever built…? I’m sure the Great Wall of China beats it, come to think of it. Especially considering the Great Wall of China is still there, although – never mind.

I’ll get back to my point. (For the record, I think the Romans built some pretty awesome walls as well.)

After the East Side Gallery, I got on a train and just kept riding until I was way out on the west side of Berlin, at the Wannsee. I got there just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset over the water. While I was walking around, I noticed a boat that looked like it had teeth on it. It also had a tail on the back of it. No kidding. The name of the boat is “Moby Dick”.

It’s rather attention-grabbing, I have to admit.

Finally, this is one of the best sunset pictures I took. The color is just right, and you can make out the sailboats in the foreground.

I really like this one.

I stalked some trams for my dad and have a bunch of pictures to upload. I also got some of S-Bahns and U-Bahns. I played with the shutter time a little bit with these, so the motion will be really obvious. I’m heading back out to go see if I can find more photo-ops, so I’m not going to worry about uploading them right now. I’ll do that tonight, when I get back.

I’ve also done most of my souvenir shopping. I just need to stop at a supermarket and buy tons of chocolate. I found something for myself too – a bag (of course). I’ll post a picture of that tonight as well.

Be back later!

I guess I’ll find out soon.

In many situations, the auto-focus insisted on focusing on the bars or glass between me and my target, so I had to switch to manual focus. If any of the shots are slightly blurry, this is why. Most of them are fine, though. Click for more.

I took a lot of pictures in the aquarium and reptile house, but it’s hard to get good pictures of fish. And even harder to do so in a dark place, with no tripod. Nevertheless, there are some good ones in there. I had been intending to go through and pick some good ones to highlight in a post, but since it took so long for them to upload, that’s not going to happen tonight. I still really want to, so I may work on that tomorrow afternoon.

I didn’t get to see the polar bear cub born here recently. I’m not sure if I couldn’t find his enclosure, or if I did find it, and he was inside or elsewhere. I did see lots of big cats, and bears, and wolves, as well as some penguins and sea lions. In the aquarium I saw lots of cool-looking fish, a few enormous fish, and a lot of snakes and lizards. They even had a Diamondback Rattlesnake – made me feel right at home.

For anyone who’s wondering, I also added a new set to my pictures. It’s called DPS, and is completely unrelated to my pictures from Berlin. I’m participating in a contest on another site – Digital Photography School. This week’s contest is shots of something “affirmative”, hence my picture of the little “Walk” symbol here in the east side of Berlin.

In this photo, you can also see what the weather looked like today while I was walking around the zoo all afternoon – rainy. The temperature hovered around 60° all afternoon, with the occasional shower forcing me to pull out my umbrella so my camera didn’t get wet.

I have plans to go to church tomorrow, but I don’t know what I’m doing after that. Quite frankly, I’m too tired to think about it right now, so I’m going to sleep. Gute nacht!

Ok, I can’t resist just one.

He’s staring right at me. Either he really wanted to pose for my picture, or I look tasty.

It is rainy, and dark, and gloomy, and a little cold today. And it’s wonderful. This is the kind of weather I was hoping for in coming to Berlin, not the heat we had my first 2 weeks. I’m going to be changing into a long-sleeved shirt with my jacket for this afternoon, and will carry my umbrella with me everywhere.

Of course, it also seems to keep the bees at bay, which is nice. I was sure that with the number of bees that hang around any place with food service outside (almost every restaurant and café), I was going to get stung eventually. Yesterday afternoon, I was standing outside the school waiting for some friends to decide where they wanted to go for lunch, when I was attacked. I don’t know what this irritating insect decided it suddenly had against me, but it flew directly into the side of my head, right in front of my ear. Naturally, I lifted my hand and batted the dive-bombing creature out of the way. It fell to the ground in front of me, and my friends noticed it was dying. I was a little distracted checking to make sure the thing hadn’t stung my face, and was a little confused. It hadn’t stung my face, but it was definitely dying, so it must have stung something. I slowly came to the conclusion that the pain in my hand was a little too strong to have been caused solely by an impact with a suicidal insect, and while I watched, a small part of my hand began to turn red and swell up. One of my friends apparently has the ultimate cure for bee stings, but I didn’t let her try. I wasn’t about to let her go burning my hand – I don’t care if it neutralizes the venom. Weighing the amount of pain from a bee sting versus the amount of pain from someone intentionally burning my hand…well, the bee sting pain only lasted about an hour. The visual proof of the sting is almost gone now; there’s only a very small red mark where the stinger must have lodged. Now I can tell Hattie “I told you so” – this happened about two hours after she had been telling me the bees are harmless.

So that’s my exciting bee-sting story.

I stopped at a neat little Italian restaurant today after class, and grabbed breakfast. I hadn’t eaten this morning, but even if I had, bread, fruit, a croissant, an egg, and a cappuccino would have been too good to pass up. It was excellent.

My big plans for this afternoon are to go shopping. I’m going to head over to the big department store in Schöneberg, KaDeWe, and see if I can’t spend the last of the money I took out before I left America. Good thing I have my debit card – I’m going to need it next week.

I have a few specific things I’m looking for, and one of them is a souvenir for myself – something to remind me of this trip. I have some ideas, but I keep remembering that I don’t need another backpack or purse.

I doubt that’s going to stop me if I see one I really like.

Later tonight is the pub crawl organized by the school in Kreuzberg. I expect this will be their biggest event – almost all of the students are going. All of the ones I’ve talked to are going, anyway. That’s a good thing, in my opinion, as it means I’ll have someone to hang with. Actually, I’ll have lots of people. I can group-hop. Awesome.

Time to head out and go shopping!

Of course, for an exhibit like that to come alive means I heard some pretty heart-wrenching stories.

I couldn’t believe how many stories there are about women and children being killed. There was one story about a mother who made sure the guard knew her son was under 12 so he would avoid the hard work at the forced-labor camp. She also asked if her mother could go with the children for the same reason. She didn’t know that everyone in that group would be shot. She sentenced her older son and mother to death.

The museum is underground, underneath the big concrete blocks (stelae) that most pictures show. The ceiling is designed so that the recesses show where the stelae are located, above ground.

The museum is organized into rooms, each of which has a specific focus.

The first is the Room of Dimensions.

Each of the lighted sections of floor contains someone’s personal experience written down. These are short sections of writing – a letter, postcard, or diary entry – that describes a personal experience regarding their persecution. One particularly touching excerpt is the postscript of a letter written to a father. The daughter states that she is writing because she is going to die, and she wants to say goodbye.

The second room is the Room of Families.

Rather than recesses in the ceiling, the stelae stretch toward the floor in this room. They are used to tell stories of 15 specific families. Each family has a family picture, as well as pictures and text illustrating what life was like before their persecution, and how they died. One family does not have a family picture, as this information was destroyed. The audio guide sometimes had personal testimony from family members as well.

The third room is called the Room of Names. I don’t have a picture. In this room, the names and dates of birth and death of Jews who were murdered or presumed dead are projected onto each of the four walls, while brief biographies are read aloud, first in German, then English. According to the literature, reading out these names and biographies like this for all the victims would take about six years, seven months, and 27 days.

The fourth and final room is the Room of Sites.

This room contains a map showing the locations of 500 extermination and concentration camps, mass executions, ghettos, deportation routes, and death marches.

The points in red, with names listed, are highlighted in greater detail around the room. The audio guide tells stories about a few locations, like the one I mentioned earlier regarding the woman sentencing her own child to death. This room brings to light the horrors of those camps, discussing firing squads and gas chambers. Some prisoners also did forced labor, but many were murdered on the spot.

The tour ends in the Holocaust Memorials Database, which highlights other memorials around the world, and allows patrons to search for specific victims.

Some photos of other memorials:

and the computer terminals available to look up victims:

After this, returning to the sun above ground feels like returning to reality.