Tales from Nordrhein-Westfalen

okay well first I have to say, today, blimey! it's so freezing. Like 2°C during the day, I think. And minus something at night!
I arrived back from Berlin on Saturday, after the most Amazing week ever. It went something like this...
We left on Monday morning from Düsseldorf, and spent the whole day travelling, until we arrived (duh) at about 5.30pm. After settling into our rooms and eating dinner, (Ava and Lauren were in a room with the two girls from Cambridge, and I was in with three girls from Dunedin, Emma, Robyn and Anita, who were all really nice) we made a small trip to Kufürstendamm, the shopping district, to test out the public transport (this was all at about 10 at night) and look at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis-Kirche (Church dedicated to the memory of Kaiser Wilhelm) which does actually look better at night than in the day.
Tuesday we did a speed-tour of Berlin in the morning, during which we saw what's left of the wall (it's really skinny), lots of beautiful churches and old buildings, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Holocaust Memorial, dedicated to the memory of the unknown Jews who were killed. It was pretty eerie to walk through: it consists of hundreds of smooth, dark grey, stone blocks of varying heights and on varying ground levels, and they're all in rows and columns taking up a whole block of the city. No one knows the actual interpretation of it, but there's one theory, and that's that it's meant to make you lose your orientation a little, which is definitely true. Our wonderful american guide, Tom (everytime he said Berlin he said it a certain emphasised way, which you all definitely have to hear me try to mimic), even showed us the hotel right beside the Brandenburg Gate where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out of the window. I saw Humboldt Üniversität too, on Unter den Linden, which was originally famous for philosophy but then became famous for physics, and Einstein proclaimed his theory of relativity from there We then had some free time to do some shopping,then went to an exhibition called The Story of Berlin, which was all about the history of Berlin divided into different aspects like work, religion and so on. We had free time again after this, but cos it was monday night and nothing was open, we ended up going to McCafe Of All Places!!
On Wednesday we were split into groups of about six people and each group was given a place/attraction in Berlin to go to and answer questions on, by ourselves, and had to come back in the afternoon and make a little presentation to the others about what we found (Preferably, Herr Stein said, auf Deutsch, but only two brave boys actually did this...). My group had the Olympia Stadion, where there was absolutely NOTHING going on, but we still managed to have some fun hehe. mostly cos each group was given a disposable camera to take photos with. Later we went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum,which was pretty good but a lot of reading.
On Thursday the day was all about Potsdam, an area of Berlin (sort of its own town) but some of the program was cancelled/changed because of the storm warnings and it was rainy and windy and all that. We did a bus tour of Potsdam though, again with our wonderful guide Tom, and went through Grunewald where all the posh people and country ambassadors live (we saw the houses of the turkish and swedish and who-knows-where-else ambassadors) and a house owned by Yoko Ono. We also went through Wannsee,which is a pretty rich suburb on the bank of the Wannsee (it looks like a lake but apparently it's really a widening of the Spree river) and went past House Wannsee, where the Wannsee conference was held, to make important decisions about the Final Solution in WWII, and it was where they decided on the use of gas chambers in concentration camps. We didn't go inside though. We walked around the outside of Cecilien Hof, an old english-style house where the Potsdam Conference was held, attended by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill to make some important decisions or other (stuff about the future of Berlin while it was split between britain, america, france and the soviets)...then toured the Sanssouci palace, where Friedrich the Great (Friedrich II) lived his summers (the name Sanssouci means without cares/worries, so he allowed no women to enter the palace), which was really ornate and really...gold. it was quite pretty for a man's palace, actually. We had to wear ginormous slippers over our regular shoes to protect the floors too. so that was fun. you can probably imagine us skidding all over the floors of a huge old palace. hehe. We had no free time in Potsdam as had been promised, because of the weather, so we went back to the hostel and did an evaluation of our entire time in germany early instead, and played Skip-Bo, which I was introduced to by Robyn, my wicked roommate, and which we played for a very long time without ever getting bored. t'was great. BUT, that evening the teachers decided the weather was okay for us to visit the Reichstag luckily, so we went there in the gales and climbed up into the glass dome on top (after being shut outside until they felt like letting some more people in and then going through the metal detector) . It was so beautiful though, we had a 360° view of Berlin at night, which was amazing, and we had lots of time there as well, so we could just go up to the top which took probably less than 5 minutes and hang out and talk.
On Friday morning we had the chance to visit one of four museums: the Jüdisches museum, all about the history of the Jews (NOT about the Holocaust); the Pergamon Museum, with ancient greek, iranian and turkish restorations of architecture and objects etc; the Boden Museum, which is really new and has art stuff, I think from the Renaissance and such things; or the Deutsches Technikmuseum, which is about technology and that stuff. I went to the Pergamon Museum, which was pretty interesting, but lots of the same sort of things and there are only so many greek statues and iranian 'tiles with knobs' you can stand looking at before you get bored. We then had free time for the rest of the day (from about 12 pm till 7.30pm) in which we could shop or see more sights or anything we wanted as long as we were in groups of four or more.
That evening we all went bowling, which was a wicked end to the most awesome, fun day. The guy there who was playing the music welcomed us all cos we were from NZ and Australia, and even played us a special song - 'I come from a land Down Under' hehe - which was great, and everyone had so much fun. It kinda hit us after that that we all had to go back to our host families the next day, and no one wanted to very much, especially when people had made good friends there like I had with my dunedin roommates and cos some people are going home via london and other places to visit family so they won't be on the flight home with us, and if they live in a different place in NZ we might not see them again.
The next morning we left the youth hostel at about 9.30am, and travelled home (slept), and after dropping about 4 lots of people off at stops along the way, arrived in Düsseldorf at about 5.30 or 6 pm to lots of hugs and big welcomes from our host families - i think they might have even missed us! And there was lots of news to hear, even after just a week.
On Sunday afternoon (after a big sleep in) Malin and Kerstin took me to Altenburg, about 10 min drive, to the Altenburger Dom and Märchenwald, both of which were nice. The Märchenwald (fairytale forest) had little houses and displays of different fairytales, and when you push a button, music plays and the fairytale is told, like Schneewittchen (snow white), Rotkäppchen (little red riding hood), Dornröschen (sleeping beauty), die drei Bremer Stadtmusikanten ( the musicians of Bremen) and lots more. The Altenburger Dom (church/cathedral) was okay, it was huge and had beautiful big stained glass windows.
The rest of my time until now has been filled with mundane things such as school etcetera.
Home in less than 2 weeks now!
Lots of love, and miss everyone Heaps

Kim