Going to Berlin 4 days before our JPs were due was a great idea! (Seriously)

First, a quick title explanation. Princeton requires every senior to write a thesis; most departments also require independent research junior year, too. The history department requires independent research both semesters junior year, both times culminating in a junior paper (JP). When we decided a month ago to go to Berlin this past weekend, neither Anna nor I really comprehended how close it was to our JP deadline of May 7. Both of us used Berlin as a major source of motivation, though, and we pretty much had full drafts together by the time our bus pulled away from Prague! (At the end of this post you'll see a celebratory post-JP ice cream picture of me and Anna). 

Though Michèle--mom's friend and my birthday twin--thought we might find the directions from the bus station to her apartment to be complicated, we found a nice German lady to show us how to get from the subway stop to the right street, and crashed almost immediately (though not before eating a kinder-egg!)

In the morning, we took our time waking up and then went for an all-day walk around the Schöneberg and Kreuzberg districts. Kreuzberg is definitely more on the tourist hit-list, but Schöneberg less-so. Among other sites, we saw where the socialist revolutionary/Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, and ate lunch at the cafeteria in the basement of Rathaus Schöneberg (city hall) where JFK gave his "ich bin ein Berliner" speech (1:44) in 1963. We also walked through lots of parks--some of them secret--including many whose playgrounds were constructed of wood!

Kreuzberg was surrounded on three sides by the Berlin Wall, and when the wall came down, it was smack in the middle of the city. Rent was cheap at first so lots of artist-folk and other similarly-minded people came, but now there are huge conflicts between squatters and local governments--and the gentrifiers who are trying to come in and raise prices. 

Anna and I split off for a bit to wander the Turkish market--a strange mix of tourists buying Turkish delights (us) and fancy jams (also us) and locals buying necessities (fabric, vegetables, sandals, soap). The best part of the market, of course, was that many of the stands had free samples of their produce: the best pineapple I've ever eaten, perfectly-salted crispy cucumber, juicy orange, and lots and lots of jams. 

Very Berlin: outdoor ping-pong tables everywhere! (721 clan, if we come to Berlin for Thanksgiving, everyone can play at once! They do four-person games here, where each person gets a quarter of the table and each time someone hits it you run clockwise to the next quarter). 

I was also very impressed with the street art and murals that seemed to be everywhere; much more prominent than in Prague, certainly, and more purposeful and well-done in Berlin than anywhere else I've been. These faces are painted on the side of an apartment building complex, and each side of each building had a different set of people.

In the afternoon, we headed to the Jewish Museum. After wandering around aimlessly for a bit (the museum is huge and, despite maps, complicated to navigate) we realized that what we really wanted to see was the "The Whole Truth...everything you always wanted to know about the Jews" exhibit. The "Jew in a box/Ask a Jew" part has been pretty controversial--both the New York Times and the New Yorker wrote about it--but unfortunately we weren't there at the right time of day. Although I thought the exhibit was well-done and probably very informative for someone with little Jewish knowledge (it had sections on everything from "Who is a Jew?" and "Why do Jews cover their hair?" to "Is it okay to joke about the Holocaust" and "Can a Jew criticize Israel?"), it was strange to be the object of study. An exhibit on  Jewish history makes sense to me--but an exhibit about contemporary Jewish practice made me feel kind of like a goldfish. 

People have lots of questions for the Jew in a Box to answer.

Before heading to Shabbat services, we stopped in at this Russian dive for a much-needed snack. We got potato-filled fried dough, essentially, and I have no idea what it was called but it was delicious! Huge numbers of Russian immigrants have come to Berlin since the fall of Communism. 

Saturday was a tourist-trap day. Not really, but Anna and I did All The Things You're Supposed to Do in Berlin. Potsdamer Platz was the meeting place of the four occupational zones of Berlin post-WWII. Now, there's a cheesy segment of the Berlin Wall set up there with an even cheesier "get your East Berlin stamp in your passport here!" booth (how is that legal?).

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is right smack in the middle of everything. Like the exhibit at the Jewish Museum, there's been a lot of controversy about this memorial, which opened in 2005. The memorial consists of 2711 concrete-like blocks of concrete of different heights, laid out in perfect, evenly-spaced rows and columns. But, unless you specifically know that the related Information Centre is beneath your feet, you have no idea that what you're walking through is a memorial. Consequently, we saw people our age (!) hop up on top of a block and jump from one to the next. Maybe they were were just being jerks, but it seems like after enough of that kind of behavior the municipality would think to put up explanatory plaques. 

The East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall is probably the most-touristy place of them all. But we were tourists, so it's fine! The segments of the wall that are there include some original art, but mostly they've been redone and repainted by artists from around the world. This was one of my favorite segments--so many hidden pictures (Galya, made me think of you). 

Trains to Life--Trains to Death, by sculptor Frank Meisler is a dual memorial/commemoration at the Friedrichstrasse train station for those children saved in the kindertransport and those sent to their deaths at camps. There are four similar sculptures along the route of the kindertransport (of which Meisler was part) in which almost 10,000 Jewish kids were rescued and sent to foster families in the UK. 

I thought I was a pro Google searcher, but this apartment eludes me. If anyone can find any information  about a building in the Mitte district near Oranienburgerstrasse that is ornamented with monkeys and flowers, you get a shoutout in the next blog.

The dome/minaret of the Neue Synagogue (for a tour of synagogues I've seen this semester, click here). Thanks to Wikipedia, I know that the Neue Synagogue was built in the mid-19th century, but almost completely destroyed in WWII. What stands there now is almost entirely a reconstruction, and it consists pretty much just of the facade and ornaments--where the great hall used to begin, the building stops. There's an incredible amount of security out front--the entire sidewalk area in front of the synagogue is cordoned off, and two police officers pace back and forth constantly.

We had a bit of time to kill after dinner before heading back for our visit to the top of the Reichstag (more on that in a bit), so we meandered into the Tacheles workshop/gallery/artist refuge/sculpture park. (Again, thanks to Wikipedia, just learned that my original suspicion that the name Tacheles comes from the Yiddish/Hebrew was correct!) It was a bit hard to figure out how to get in--the facade of the building is massive and covered with graffiti, but the actual entrance to the sculpture garden is around a loopy-doopy path through a parking lot. I think we probably would have seen more had we gone earlier in the day, but we still got to see an incredible variety of styles of metal sculptures.

The Brandenburg Gate was one of the old gates to the city; it was damaged pretty badly during WWII, and made inaccessible by the Berlin Wall. For Americans, it's probably most famous as the location of Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech in 1987 (1:11-2:01). Cool, second American president speech in as many days!

The Reichstag is the huge, impressively imposing building of the German Parliament.  From the end of WWII until  the 1990s, it wasn't used for meetings of the government. Two cool facts about it: 1. It was technically in West Berlin, but right on the border with East Berlin. 2. Hitler never set foot in the building, so it's one of the few things in Berlin/Germany that there's no WWII guilt about.

If you wait in line for a really, really long time (or come at dinner-time so only for a long time) you can get free tickets to go to the dome on the top of the Reichstag, which was constructed in 1997 to represent the unification of Berlin. It weights 12000 tons or something like that! Obviously we waited in line, and we got tickets to go up right after sunset, which was the perfect time because of the beautiful lighting! You could see so far. 

It also represents, however cliche, the transparency of government: from the dome you can look directly down into the room where parliament meets!

Sunday morning was quite relaxing. Again, we took our time waking up and then meandered with Michèle through some lovely urban parks to get to the train station that would take us to brunch with Pinkhead/Anya^2. What a wonderful German brunch! Lots of bread and cheese and jam and fruit...

We took another meandering route to the train that would take us to our bus back to Prague, and happened upon one of Berlin's many weekend flea markets. This one was like 250 one-stall thrifts stores, all squished in next to each other outside. Ever since I read the article in the Times of Israel about the organization Bring it Home and recovering Judaica from European flea markets, I've been hoping that I'd see it happen. Well, that there is a menorah. I didn't buy it; Michèle has a point: At least in Germany, "We're all a little bit Jewish."

The beautiful view on our bus ride home! This is already after crossing back into the Czech Republic, I'm pretty sure. Though this was one of the few views I actually got to see: luckily for us, the bus was fully equipped with outlets, which meant that we could work, uninterrupted by dead batteries, on our JPs for 3+ hours! I got almost all my footnotes done then. Somehow, footnotes always take the longest; first semester I spent like 8 hours formatting them up until I turned in my paper, three minutes before the deadline. The time zone really is a gift here (though I ended up submitting hours before 3pm EST anyway).  

This is the "wordle" from the final version of my paper--basically, the larger the size of the word in the wordle, the more times it appeared in my paper. So in case it wasn't clear enough, I wrote about Jewish students at Princeton University, especially one named Aaron (last name). 

Post-JP celebratory gelato at Angelato, with the creamiest, smoothest, best pistachio (including chunks!) and mango gelato flavors I've ever had! (Though nothing holds a candle to the Bent Spoon's blood orange). 

Sorry this post took so long to go up! A few hours after submitting my JP, I got the scary Blue Screen of Death on my computer. This is, I am told (by Michèle), what the Germans call "Glück im Unglück": good luck in bad luck. More bad luck: I still have 20 pages of final papers to write for classes here. More good luck: my program let me borrow a mini-notebook laptop, so it's better than nothing!

Budapest Part 2: For all you know, these pictures could be from 2008!

When I went to Hungary with Walter Payton College Prep's math team in 2008, it never occurred to me that I'd be back so soon. But, just over 5 years later (wow!) that's exactly what happened. It turned out to be a good combination of revisiting the sites I wanted to see again, but also getting a chance to see the parts of the city that are Off Limits to a high school trip. 

After a bit of a rough start (I'd intended to get up at 5:15 am to shower before leaving at 6:10am for the bus station, only to be shaken awake by my roommate Tess at 6:02am. Oops) we got to Budapest mid-afternoon on Thursday, which left plenty of time for exploring before dinner. I'd checked the weather beforehand and it was supposed to be sunny with blue skies and temperatures in the mid-high 70s the entire time, and it was true--we had gorgeous weather the whole time we were there!

A few of us took a walk from our hotel, located right near the famous Oktogon intersection, to the river and around through town and came upon Ronald Reagan strolling by with the Parliament in the background. (Actually, I'd been warned by Benj that we'd find Reagan, because he'd sent me a fantastic description of what to see and how to get there. I saw almost everything on his list!)

As soon as we rounded the corner and saw the Dohány Utca Synagogue, I started getting déjà vu. When we came to Hungary in high school, we spent only about 3 days in Budapest total. Each person was allowed to give one suggestion of something they really wanted to see; mine, of course, was the synagogue. Apparently, it's the second-largest in the world. This time, we did a tour and came back for services on Friday night--they were really strange, and I wasn't really a fan: despite the separate seating for men and women, and the meticulous covering of women's shoulders with scarves, there was an organ accompanying the cantor, and his selection of tunes seemed unfamiliar to everyone there, so no one sang along. It was more of a performance than a service. Oh well--a few of us went to Chabad for dinner, and somehow were there in time for all of Kabbalat Shabbat, too, so we got to sing in the end anyway. 

Here's a look at the interior of the synagogue. It's enormous, with two levels of balconies for women, and enough seats to fit almost 3000 people. They don't use it in the winter because it's not worth the money it would cost to heat the whole thing; usually services are in the Heroes' Synagogue, which is right next door. Fun fact: the synagogue is also adjacent to the apartment where Theodore Herzl was born.

This is the painted ceiling of the Rumbach Street Synagogue, one of the 18 synagogues still standing in Budapest. Though it doesn't hold services--the interior is currently being restored--there are occasionally events held there. 

Yet another shul, though this one is functional. It's on Kazinczy street, and it's used by a very small Orthodox community. 

After hanging out for a while at Akvarium--an outdoor bar/park fusion where Budapest's young people apparently sit and drink the night away--a few of us went to check out Szimpla, Benj's recommendation for the most popular of Budapest's "ruin bars." It's a very cool  collection of pubs and rooms for hanging out set up in an abandoned warehouse right in the old Jewish quarter. There's not really an overall style for the place; the decorations are a hodge-podge of random things like you can see here: disco balls, Christmas lights, hubcaps from cars, bike wheels, neon lights, etc. There's also an outdoor area, and it's just a very relaxed environment where you could sit with friends for hours and not feel like you have to keep buying drinks. Although I will say that I got a honey pálinka, a traditional Hungarian brandy, because I remember that my dad told me I was supposed to try that when I came in 2008.

Full moon! Or at least, mostly full. This is the view from my hotel window, overlooking Liszt Ferenc tér (Franz Liszt Square). 

The Central Market was filled with clothes and tapestries decorated in traditional Hungarian embroidery.  I didn't get one, but I did find a lovely teacup to add to my collection! Actually, the teacup is made out of wood, so I'm going to have to figure out how to coat it with lacquer so it's usable.

I think our tour guide told us that this little girl in front of Buda Castle--she's a princess--doesn't actually have a lot of significance but, in the past couple of years, she's become an icon in tourist's pictures. 

We crossed the Chain Bridge to get from Pest to Buda, and from there climbed up to Fisherman's Bastion on the Buda side (Pest is as flat as Chicago; Buda's got hills). In the background of this picture you can see the Parliament building which, according to Benj, is "literally always under construction because it is ornamented with actual gold leaf"--good thing we did a tour in 2008! Once we made it to the top, we only had a bit of free time to wander.

Although going inside the Matthias Church sounded appealing (the stained glass and frescoes are supposed to be incredible) I've seen a lot of churches in the past few months, and  the cakes and pastries at Ruszworm--"run by the last, still active Hungarian confectionery dynasty," whatever that means--sounded irresistible. Sara and I split a dobos torta, which was absolutely delicious, and exactly what I wanted to be eating while looking over the Danube.

Sitting in one of the window alcoves of Fisherman's bastion with the Parliament, and the Danube, behind me. For comparison with 5 years ago at pretty much the same spot (although probably about 30 degrees cooler), see the picture below.

March 2008.

A view of the Parliament, etc. from the Chain Bridge.

On Saturday night, I took a three-hour walk alone along the river before circling back through town . Everything was so pretty with the lights and, while the streets and bars were full of people, not many were walking down by the Danube, so it was nice and quiet. 

A bit south of the Parliament building I came upon these cast iron shoes on the promenade. It's a memorial to the Jews who were shot into the river by the Arrow Cross party in 1944-1945.

If ever there was a perfect day for going to an island where cars are forbidden, Sunday was the day. We had a few hours of free time before loading up on he bus back to Prague, and a group of us headed to Margaret Island, where we lay in the sun, played Frisbee, made friends with three-year-olds, and wore flowers in our hair. The day before, we'd gotten to spend a lot of time outside too; after our walking tour of the city, we went to the Széchenyi thermal baths, lazing away the evening in lots of mineral pools ranging in temperature from 65 degrees (so cold!) to about 120. There were also saunas and steam rooms, but I had trouble breathing in such hot air so I mostly stuck to the pools.

How I know summer is upon us: my feet enter a perpetual state of dirtiness because of running around barefoot!

This is my favorite mural that I've ever seen. The color of the painted sky was an exact match with the color of the real sky, and the real trees blended in perfectly with the painted ones. And with that lovely picture, I'll leave you until next time (which will probably be about the upcoming weekend in Berlin, with Michèle and Anna!)