Berlin June 20 2009 Trip to Hamburg!

Doing my duties as an international exchange student, I made the 2.75 hour trip out to Hamburg; one of Germany's few, perhaps only shipping cities on their very limited coastline! As usual, you can find all the pictures on my Facebook profile under David Gregg. The albums should be open to the public.

Hamburg was not at all what I had expected. Historically, this was always one of Germany’s most important cities in terms of economics. Today, the city is still an industrial capital. There still exists a historical section, but its being quickly eaten up by corporate development in a very strange infusion of old and new. The reason for this is all the ports, docks and industry! Everything, save one theater is nothing but dock and factory on the other side of the Elbe River, which is an incredible amount of space.
I took mitfahr there... if you're wondering what exactly that is, it's like an online Craig’s list where people with cars register and you can call them up and ride with them wherever they're going for a small price. It's an amazing system, and is quite cheap. I got into the city pretty early, so I did some waking downtown before looking for my hostel. That's when I saw most of the pretty churches and city buildings in the downtown old city. They were nice.
The thing with Hamburg to be aware of... at least for when I was there is the weather. Nasty storms come plowing from the West off of the North Sea. They're very cold and windy. I even got hit with some random hail at one time. As soon as they're gone though, the city becomes warm, pleasant and beautiful once more... Watch out also for the developing section to the Southeast. I wandered down that way in search of a Submarine exhibition that's no longer there... along with anything else! The whole area is half under construction; and empty ghost town... but only because it's not finished yet, which is an odd twist.

Hamburg has one of the most beautiful botanical garden/park centers in Europe, and it's huge. It's cared for by the city and university, that has a large botany section. They have an old Garden and a Japanese section. The whole thing is absolutely beautiful, and I would consider a must-see, though I'm kind of a garden/park nut, so who knows! lol.

The boat rides are great too, and you can do them with just a simple transit ticket if you want. Ignore all the silly "sailor" dudes who will try to tempt you with their long tours around the canal. It's much more worth it just to take the larger boats with the electric signs on the side. It's really funny, because they even say the same things on them that you here on the trains; the famous "zurrueck bleiben bitte" (equates to 'mind the gap')as the door goes up and down. People have to take the boats to get to work at the docks on the other side of the canal after all!
At first I thought that Hamburg had one of the lamest night life of all the cities I've seen, but then I found Reeperbahn street, which turned out to be the exact opposite for my taste; WAY too intense! There was a club simply titled "injection" with a huge syringe as the sign... there were Granny pole dancers! It was smart the way they arranged it though. It was all contained on one little street from what I saw, and there were tons of cops there to make sure order was kept, so I didn't feel in danger or anything... unless I had gone in one of those places, which I didn't! I'm an innocent exchange student from WMU after all! :D

Checked out a pretty nice museum in the garden district... no surprises there aside from how nice the museum exhibits themselves were; very interactive and informative. The city has been a port city for 500 years, and always will be. Other than that its history is similar to most other German cities; war, explosions and regret from the last century followed by steady recovery.
They had a huge Lego store, which I was very happy to see!
I also had a huge hamburger at a restaurant there... wow how silly of me :P
There was an all-age group rowing race going on the second day I was there, which was pretty interesting

I got home late on Saturday, missing a party held by one of my theater buddies... oh well. Today I did laundry, posted the pictures and made some banana bread. I've been trying to get the right software to make music videos for random things today as well, and that's proving to be hectic at times... the hard part was finding a file converter so my editing software could cut clips I wanted to edit... sigh. k, well I guess that's all I got to report for now... pretty sure... had a great presentation last week! Oh, and I need to get working on a paper I have to do for my language course... keep forgetting about that... le-sigh... other than that things are going super! My performance is coming up soon... oh and that summer course back at Wayne will be starting in a week... sent an e-mail about that with no reply... oh well, enough babble! Peace all,
Dave

Berlin, June 15

Hey all... sigh. This was a very busy weekend, and was also kind of slow at the same time. I went on a tour through Berlin once again, though this time it was with the goal of collecting information on the history of Jews in Berlin for a presentation I'll be doing this week. I was working on the presentation the entire weekend, and got it down pretty well finally.
The history itself is massive of course, and it all started way before holocaust; even their persecution. It's sad really that the only first evidence of Jews in Berlin occurred 40 years after Berlin was founded in 1251. All it was a boycott on Jewish threadwork and a ban placed on Jews from participating in craft guilds or Christian ceremonies. After that they got kicked out of the city at least 4 times in the following 400 years. The first time was from 1348 to 1354 because they were being blamed for starting the black plague! Guess the department of health back then was a little lacking...


They got kicked out three more times between 1446 and 1671, and banished for 100 years until 1771. The reasons this time all revolved around alleged ceremonies the Jews would hold where they would take the blood of Christian priests and children to reanimate the suffering for Christ or something. Whether these were all just rumors or not is uncertain... I mean after all, the Christians did plenty of their own crazy stuff back then. The problem for the Jews though in doing weird religious rituals was that they were a minority, and easily blamed, persecuted and banished very easily, especially since they were so good at making money, and the city took any opportunity they could to seize their property.


Things were pretty good for the Jewish community from 1771 until the Nazis went all crazy on them. They had some significant historical figures like Moses Mendelson, who tried to create a secularist branch of Judaism so they'd finally start integrating with Christian society. I guess we're pretty good at that in the US... it's so hard to compare really. I mean, we have so many different minorities, with very different religions, and they somehow seem to get along together much more successfully than I've seen even in modern day Europe... not sure how we do it really... not to say we don't have bigots or government enforced persecution in our history... Each country has a very unique sensitive history relating to different populations being repressed... we're learning how to be more fair as day go by... slowly but surely, so that's a good enough conclusion on all that!



Anyway, I also visited a four-hundred year old castle during my trip across Berlin. It's in Spandau, which is also where the first Jewish settlement was. They even have a "Jewish street" there, though I have no idea if there's still any Jewish families living there... currently there's only about 20k Jews in Berlin, when in the turn of the 19th century there were about 90k. The funny thing about this Citadel though is that they've turned it into a big nightclub! Korn had played there last week... wow. It was a very pretty place still. They had a woodwork center and a blacksmith as well... along with tons of really creepy modern statues. See my facebook album by the way for more photos than what I've put up here.

hope you all enjoyed this cultural/historical experience
I also check out Grunewald track 17, which is a memorial for the 50k Jews that were transported out of Berlin to the extermination camps. The strange thing was that there was a film crew there doing a documentary, and they filmed me checking the memorial out... very odd, but I'm definitely going to check and see if I'm in it when it comes out! lol.
with me... lol... I'll try to do more exciting stuff for the non-scholars out there I swear!
PS the final picture of the creepy faces is called "Fallen Leaves" in the Berlin Jewish museum.

Berlin June 7th

Alright, so not a whole bunch happened last weekend that I remember… I was preparing like crazy for two referats (presentation) I had that week, and guess what? My verdammte internet goes out! I kid you not, a lightning bolt hit our building and surged my computer, temporarily snuffing some drives. So I had no internet on Sunday, and was stuck having to do most of the work and data collection on the following Monday. I’m not sure if I’ve posted already over seeing “Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band” last Monday, but that was amazing too! Maybe I’ll try to include a picture of them in this note too, if I didn’t do anything on them before.
This weekend we went to Weimar. It’s a little town a bit north of Leipzig. I went with my two friends from England; Emma and Lucille. Som other people from my sprachkurs (language course) were also there.

The town was super small and most of it revolved around this Dude Goethe. Who founded a whole buncha fun stuff there? The city is described as being “an extraordinarily large park, that so happens to surround a small town. The first day was cool. We just walked around the town a bit and then went to a Shakespeare themed restaurant. Our program arranger had provided us food for that evening, and the restaurant was great. I had some pasta with Salmon in it.



We three went out that night. We had been given a recommendation to check out some place up on the border to the new town, but when we stopped for directions there person told us that the place was no good, so she gave us a different recommendation. We were nice and drunk, and had a really fun time at this place, though it only fit about fifty people at most. It was cozy though, and the basement was sweet; it was made of stone and smelled like ancient cave walls. Ema also found her last name written on the wall of the bathroom door, which also rocked.
We got a little lost on our way back, and didn’t end up getting to sleep until around 4, which led to a terrible hangover for me the next day.

Saturday kinda stank from the get-go. Breakfast was good, but we had a city tour to go on, and it rained the whole way through. This city is also themed after the Ginko Biloba tree, because they had specially ordered some from far away and planted them all over the place. They found Ginko interesting because it was one of the few plants to return to existence after the ice-age. We also saw a pretty interesting Soviet memorial…


I have a strange attraction to everything Russian… don’t ask me why. Just be thankful for me that it’s not the 60’s anymore!
So yeah, we also checked out a crazy architecture museum and stuff as well.



It was alright, but the horrible weather on Saturday mixed with the hangover and we also saw a pretty bad opera at the end of the day… well, it wasn’t that bad to be honest. I just don’t like Operas… dislike them even more than musicals, and I don’t like musicals much either. Got a good nap in there at least!



The second half was pretty good though… it was kinda like West Side story meets Macbeth or something… in modern day! The spinny stage was rather entertaining… kinda like watching a dim-sum with waling opera people. Lolz
The next day was more interesting. We got enough sleep the night before, and went off to do our own things.

I circumnavigated the city; first checked out an old church which was pretty nice, then I got stopped by a kitty, that came right up to me so I got to pet it, and was very happy by this. Then I found Nietzsche’s archive, and walked all the way out to the border of town out into the rolling country side.
After that I found the most amazing part. There was a super old cemetery in the middle of town with a WW1 memorial and a Russian orthodox church.



It was probably the most moving thing I found there. They were having a baptism at the time, and the singing was amazing. Fun stuff… Then I went around to the front and got to check out Goethe’s Sarcophagus! How fun… After that I went on a long walk through the park, encountering the old ruins of the Shakespeare stage that we saw the day before… they looked much better then… I also saw an old roman building, some pretty rivers and Goethe’s garden house, which has a duplicate right beside it… They’re weird like that. I also got some peanut icecream at a shop, which was pretty odd I had to say… big ole’ pieces of peanut were just stuck right there in the icecream… it was pretty good though. After that we took the train rid back home. All in all it was a pretty good trip though. Poor Ema was getting pretty tired by the end of it though, which I don’t blame her. She’s more of a big city girl I’d say, though I make my peace quite will with small towns… no wonder, saying I’m from the U.P… lol.

Anyway, it was a great time, and now I’m back in Berlin and back to business studying for me next referat and getting my lines down. Yay is me! Peace all,
Dave