The randomness that is my life...

So, apologies for being MIA recently. Life has been busy for sure...I've been doing some intense traveling recently.

Picking up from last week, I flew to Prague on Wednesday night, thus missing my Thursday class. Fortunately for me, Thursday class was canceled anyways due to my professor getting into a bicycle accident (really unfortunate for him...no worries, he is okay). So I met up with Hannah in Prague and from Prague, we took a train straight to Berlin the next morning. Berlin was absolutely amazing. We went to Museum Island and inside the National History Museum where we saw that famous picture of Martin Luther. We also walked down Idiot's Mile (currently a fabulously expensive street called Unter Den Linden), named this because during the Cold War, it was all that visitors to the East saw and this gave them little idea of the city. We saw statues of Frederick the Great and Bismarck amongst plenty other statues. We went into St Hedwig's Cathedral, which wasn't that majestic inside. We also saw Berlin Cathedral, a Protestant Church that was built in 1905 to look like it was built in the 1600s or so! We learned a lot about Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a very famous architect in Berlin who designed many of the famous sites we saw. Of course we also walked through Brandenburg Gate on many occasions. It's my favorite site in Berlin because of the history behind the gate. Legend is that every army that's occupied Berlin since (1800s?) has walked through the gate. It's beautiful and sits in Pariser Platz along with the U.S. Embassy (Hooray!).

Aside from those sites, my favorite story of the trip is Hannah and I went to take a walking tour of Berlin last Friday where I (randomly) run into Colleen, Lauren's hallmate who I met a couple of weeks ago in London! She happened to be meeting a couple of friends in Berlin for the weekend but they weren't arriving until later in the night, so she ended up spending the day on the tour and hangin' out with us. We met up for drinks later that night and drank some Berlinerwis (some strawberry or green apple beer). Seriously, what a small world!

Okay, so more things we did in Berlin was to go walk to the top of the Reichstag, where German Parliament resides. We also walked over the bunker where Hitler shot himself and walked through the Jewish Memorial as well as several other WWII/WWI and probably some other war memorials. Of course we also saw the Berlin wall and straddled the line where the Berlin Wall once stood between East and West Berlin. We walked through Tiergarten and saw the Victory Column where Obama spoke at last summer. We saw the famous Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson dangled that blanket outside of the balcony. We saw Checkpoint Charlie where there was a pretend guard by day and male stripper by night (no joke). We also went to Potsdamer Platz and Alexander Platz (both not very exciting, so skip it if you're in Berlin). Finally, we wrapped it up by seeing Charlottesburg Palace, which had a backyard the size of Tiergarten (imagine a smaller version of Central Park in NYC) and a lake. All of this would have been much more enjoyable had the weather not been snowy, rainy, or cold as it was when we were there. However, the food was pretty cheap and the cost of living in Berlin seemed pretty low. Even though rarely anybody spoke any English, I still had a great experience. I would definitely recommend Berlin as a city to see one day. The history behind the city is so incredible and the architecture was so cool, somewhat different from the rest of Europe.

I'll write on Prague and post pictures a little later. I just wanted to go ahead and get this up.

As a side note, Wharton just informed me that I do have to take another class at Erasmus (even though this class wouldn't really fulfill any necessary requirements for me), thus completely ruining my plans to end class on March 5th and travel extensively through Europe. Darn! No worries, I still found a class that only meets once a week on Wednesdays.