Our excursion to Berlin has been my favorite experience in Germany thus far. It is an amazing feeling to be immersed within a city filled with so much culture and history. The first night we hit the ground running with a tour of the city.
We visited several historical sights including the television tower, constructed by East Berlin as a monument to the DDR. We walked through the famous Brandenburg Gate, which used to be a symbolism of division between East and West Berlin. We have all grown up learning about the division between the East and West, but to stand before the Brandenburg Gate and the remains of the Berlin wall was a surreal experience. Our city tour ended upon the rooftop of the Reichstag. The Reichstag is the home of the Bundestag, Germany’s Federal Parliament. From the rooftop, we were able to see a 360ş view of the Berlin skyline.
On day two of our excursion, we split up into four groups to discover the city on our own. Each of us with a mission to explore a defining aspect of Berlin (street art, architecture, the World Wars, and the Cold War). My group chose to explore the plethora of street art within Berlin. It seems as though every inch of Berlin is covered with street art ranging from graffiti tagging to building-side murals. A monument for professional street art is the the East Side Gallery, a 1.3 kilometer wall constructed with the slabs from the original Berlin Wall.
Day three brought us to the Babelsberg Studio. The Babelsberg Studio is the site where features such as Flightplan, Inglorious Basterds, and Hansel & Gretel were filmed. It was fantastic to experience how different the German studio system is from studios in Los Angeles. Through the tour, we were able to see the Babelsberg sound stage, wood workshop, prop house, and backlot.
After lunch we visited the beautiful Sanssouci Palace. The Sanssouci Palace is the burial place of Friedrich Willhelm, the King of Prussia responsible for cultivating the potato in Germany. After experiencing the exquisite living of the 18th century, we strolled through the terraced vineyard and extensive gardens.
During our final morning in Berlin, we visited the holocaust memorial of Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen was one of the first work/concentration camps to be built in Germany in 1936. Reading a text book can never compare to walking on the same ground where the atrocities of the holocaust occurred. It seems impossible to imagine what life was like within those walls for the victims of the war. We were rendered speechless.
Written by Paul Giacomazzi
