At Home in the Land of My Fathers: August 2012

So today I slept in...until 9:30 (2:30 according to my body), but it felt good nonetheless. I'm still getting over jet lag, but it shouldn't take too much longer to adjust fully. I took this morning easy, but this afternoon I traveled around Berlin with Thomas Schmidt. He's a cousin of Ben Müller, and he was as excited to try out his English as I was my Deutsch. It made for good conversations, most of mine being in broken Deutsch.

First we had some business to do in Köpenick, the suburb in which the Müllers live, but after that we took the train to visit the Goethe Insititut, so I could see where it is in the city. Luckily it's very close to the U-Bahn (the underground train). I'll get my monthly bus/train pass on September 1st, so it will last me all of next month, which is how long I'll be studying at Goethe.

Next we visited the Alexanderplatz, where the "Fernsehturm" is. It was a Soviet tv tower (actually DDR, but about the same), and it's the largest structure in Germany, which is hard to believe, since the tall structures in America are all skyscrapers with office buildings. Nevertheless, it was very interesting to see, though since it was cloudy, and because I was on the wrong side, I couldn't see the "Pope's Revenge," which is a cross that appears when the sun is in the sky. You can imagine how angry that made the Communists...

Alexanderplatz is where we had coffee and walked around a bit. St. Mary's Church is also there, but I found that out later. Unfortunately Thomas didn't know what it was called. I now wish that I'd taken pictures of it, but I didn't want to post pictures of a church that I couldn't identify. While we were there, it was also raining, so I wasn't too keen on getting my iPad out to take pictures in the rain. In hindsight, I should have taken the pictures and just looked it up later, as I just have. Now I'm kicking myself for not asking others around me for more information about it. Oh well. I am going to need to return there, especially to see Martin Luther's statue outside of it.

Next we met up with two girls whom Thomas knew. They were nice, but they weren't as eager to speak English as Thomas was, so I couldn't exactly understand everything that was being said, whereas with Thomas alone, I could interject for the meanings of words. We met at the Jewish Museum, where we spent 4 hours. It was quite a somber experience, because you realize the history of the European racism against the Jews; it reminded me of America's own struggles, past and present, to get past skin color. I also realized that Hitler didn't really need to do much to rile up the people, since there was already some suspicion of the Jews, though it had been waning in the previous decades. At least in America, I got the feeling that Hitler's blaming of the Jews and calling them "scapegoat" was very sudden and more of a personal hatred. So I learned a lot at the museum, but I also did some teaching, since it was great to put my Hebrew to some use among non-theology students, teaching them the basics (i.e. why I couldn't just translate Hebrew without the vowels.)

I couldn't take any pictures inside of the museum, but here are two pictures from the outside:

Finally before heading home we visited a piece of the wall and Checkpoint Charlie, which weren't too far away. The man on the right represents the American soldier, while the man on the left a DDR soldier.