German Trip: John Bradshaw

My trip began on a rainy morning as I entered BNA and was promptly given a private pat down by the TSA in a side room. After this fun encounter with security, Paul and I proceeded onto JFK where we meet up with our EIL group and played get-to-know-you games for the duration of our eight hour layover. After nearly a day and a half of traveling, we finally ended up in Berlin around 6 o’clock pm. local time. My first impression of the city was of it’s beauty and architecture, but also of an almost sense of emptiness. For a city of nearly four million people, I couldn’t help but noticed general lack of pedestrians. During the next five days of the trip we would spend a lot of our time at the Amstel hostel playing group building games as well as taking a few German lessons from our group leaders (one being a German native and the other having lived an entire year in the country post-high school). When not in the Hostel, we spent our time in Berlin taking tours of all the major sites such as the Bundestag, Holocaust memorial, and numerous sites of the Berlin wall, as well as taking a tour of the inside of the Bundestag and getting a much more personal look at the inter workings of the German government. Aside from all of the typical sites of the city, we were also given free time to discover the city for ourselves. During these outings I came across places such as an abandoned apartment building which had been turned into a 5 story modern art complex with hundreds of artist occupying and displaying their work.

The "Kunsthaus Tacheles" (Tacheles Art house) art Complex in Berlin

The Bundestag in Berlin

The new Parliament building in Berlin