UF in Berlin 2005

Update from Lauren M...

051605_dunkindonuts_1, originally uploaded by morgpet.

In the old days of the GDR, Berlin's Alexanderplatz was a showcase for the Soviets to demonstrate their engineering prowess to the fascist West. Their most prominent achievement was the enormous TV Tower, which you can see -- looking like a lime stuck on a spike -- from nearly any point in Berlin.

Of course, now that the wall has fallen and Berlin has re-unified, icons of the capitalistic West are everywhere. Which is why there's an Internet Cafe above a Dunkin' Donuts right here in Alexanderplatz. We students seem to spend half of our time at these rows of computers, e-mailing people and looking for story ideas. After spending the day wandering by ourselves through Berlin's different districts -- the parks of green Tiergarten, the museums of downtown Mitte, the graffiti-ed residential boulevards of 'trendy' Prenzlauer Berg -- it's a safe bet that we'll be able to find at least one of our fellow students sitting up here, eating a donut and checking e-mail.

(If we wanted to be really authentic, we would be eating a Berliner -- a jelly donut -- while we surfed the Internet in Alexanderplatz, but I'm not sure anyone has managed that combination yet.)

This morning, we went on on a boat tour down the Spree River, which runs right through the heart of Berlin. Unfortunately, the tour's narration was all in German, but presumably it was informative and amusing -- the other German tourists regularly burst into laughter as we meandered past the Reichstag and little riverside cafes. However, it was a really beautiful day, and it was great to see another angle of the city.

As we were waiting in line for the boat to arrive, we saw Sarah, our guide from Sunday, leading another group of tourists through her tour of Berlin. As we spend a lot of time wandering around the Berlin landmarks, we seem to frequently stumble upon her -- I saw her speaking to a group in front of the new Holocaust Memorial last night. I also saw two teenagers trying to skateboard through the memorial. It may be sacrilegious, but apparently all those flat surfaces are impossible to resist.

*Lauren MacDonald*

posted by Morgan @ 9:06 AM